The sheer blithering incompetence of Barclays Bank

The man in charge of this utterly incompetent cock-up of a business gets paid up to £8,240,000 a year

‘The older I get the more I admire and crave competence, just simple competence, in any field from adultery to zoology,’ said H. L. Mencken.

You can be damn sure he wouldn’t have found much amongst retail bankers.

I suspect it’s generally agreed by all normal thinking people that the overpaid buffoons who run banks should by and large be hung drawn and quartered.

But even by their lamentably pathetic standards Barclays stands out.

Two friends of mine have been Barclays Premium members for respectively 16 and 24 years.

This membership is supposed to give you added privileges and generally make your financial life easier.

Recently they needed to open a joint account for business reasons.

Since Barclays must know a great deal about them you would imagine this would be a formality.

But no. To do so they were required to attend an interview at a Barclays branch. What idiocy.

Understandably they were a bit piqued by this. So they went to Nationwide who arranged the whole thing in minutes without asking many questions.

How can a firm that is so insulting and inconsiderate to its best customers hope to stay in business?

How can the so blazingly incompetent remain in employment? Do they ever stop for a moment and look at the everyday running of their shoddy business?

Who employs the grasping, overpaid slugs in charge? Who decides to pay them such obscene sums? (The answer is, committees composed of other parasites). What the hell are they doing? Why are they still alive? Do they take no interest at all in how their excuse for a business is run?

The fact that in almost every area of life we see useless vermin living high on the hog while most others scratch around for a living is causing the great wave of populism in Europe and America.

It all reminds me of the period before the French Revolution.

 

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

2 Comments

  1. Douglas Burdon

    Drayton, just getting to this now. As usual you deliver your message with supreme clarity.

    Clarity…..now there’s something marketers should be focused on.

    As Roy Williams from the Wizard Academy: The risk of insult is the price of Clarity.

    But there are few who are willing to take the risk. You sir, are one of the few.

    I can only hope that a few occupants of various ivory towers around the world get to see, hear and act on your wake up call to action.

    1. Drayton

      Thank, Doug. I have so many phoney comments on here I rarely even look. Don’t know how to stop them

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