Could it be that instead of running currency scams and pissing you off they’d do better by doing the right thing?
Down the road from me a rather dull modern building was briefly occupied by part of the Hargreaves Lansdown organisation.
I only know this because they were clients for a few years. They built their business in part by offering a better service than their competitors. They were also (and still are) better at marketing.
This approach paid off to such a tune that earlier this year I calculated one of their two founders was worth more than all the Rolling Stones put together.
Now the building houses a firm called Handelsbanken. Even with my sketchy Swedish, acquired when I ran – or failed to – a disastrous record business in Stockholm 45 years ago, I can work out they must be a bank.
But I didn’t know what kind of a bank until I read something in the Financial Times.
This bank is a throwback.
They have branch managers. The branch managers do what their name suggests. They manage their branches, deciding things like who to lend money to – and at what interest rate.
If you ring up you don’t talk to some poor slave in a call centre. You can talk to the manager directly – even at weekends.
There are no sales targets, but the staff have a real interest in the business. The top bananas don’t get obscenely high salaries. Everyone gets the same bonus. A bonus such that some staff who have been with the bank for ten years can expect to retire with a million pounds.
Their customers rate them more highly than British banks’ customers do. They are more profitable. They are better funded. They have never been fined for crooked behaviour or had to go to the government for help.
The result of all this is that they are highly profitable and busy opening branches while British banks close them.
All this is the exact opposite of the way most businesses are run today. Bosses getting paid obscenely large salaries – 149 times the average of workers. Focus on slashing costs rather than improving service – and on ripping off rather than serving.
It reminds me of what I think is one of the best slogans ever written, for New York stockbrokers E.W. Barney, by Ogilvy & Mather.
“We make money the old fashioned way. We earn it.”
The entire FT article is here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ff11a4c0-2a2e-11e4-a068-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3BTb4ONih
