Apart from anticipating the likely collapse of our entire fiat monetary system, I’ve been vaguely concerned that, as a blogger sometimes dealing with controversial subjects, I might find myself among the half million Brits now debanked each year, since the Nigel Farage case brought the issue to light. After all, I’ve already had my account blocked a couple of times, simply for making perfectly legitimate purchases the bank’s algorithms disliked. It took long calls to fraud departments to re-open it (with no way of stopping the same thing happening next time). What I didn’t expect was that my church would be debanked first.
This happened last week, for no obvious or even divulged reason. Just “account permanently closed, no appeal.” A web search suggested that some churches have been closed for poorly maintained accounts, or for not keeping an adequate reserve, but that’s not us. We don’t even run a drugs ring. Anyway, with the help of the Baptist Union, our local MP, and the local miniature pony sanctuary which suffered the same thing not long ago, normal service was resumed in a few days. God is good.
This column is not about account closures, though sinister, but about my consequent decision that it would be wise to open an account with a separate bank, in case. After all, many have found that, with their assets frozen by the cancelling bank, they are unable to open another account into which the funds can be paid, because the new bank won’t take cancelled customers.
Now, I chose the bank with the nearest branch that had not recently debanked my church – a mere sixteen miles away. The national website proclaimed how much easier it was to open an account online via my smartphone. On principle I don’t own a smartphone (and of course, there are many elderly people lacking the skills to use them or the cash to buy them). But the website didn’t actually state any alternative. And because a contact number for the branch, or even the nearer Post Office banking hub, was nowhere to be found, I could only commence the online process on my desktop and hope for the best.
It was only from within that start page that I could access an explanation of the ID validation process, which from experience I knew was the most likely sticking point. Reassuringly, the correct documents to uncover my habitual money-laundering were clearly described, and the fact that either a smartphone or a computer with a webcam (Check!) would do the job.
Thus encouraged, I started answering all the pages of questions, and eventually found myself accepted and given an account number, sort code, customer number and all sorts. All that was needed now was to confirm my ID via the bank’s “partners,” obviously a company specialising in harvesting IDs (and probably selling them on to GCHQ etc). But starting their process, it soon became clear that only a live video selfie from a smartphone was acceptable – the bank had lied about the webcam option.
In fact it turned out that their software couldn’t even recognise Linux, but when I tried the process again on a Windows machine it was no better. It was 5G or push off.
There followed a long and fruitless “conversation” with the bank’s AI assistant, Cora, which had been trained on Janet and John and hadn’t even heard of a Turing test. Failing to understand my questions about ID without a phone, however phrased, it offered to put me through to a human assistant who, after a wait, joined the typed conversation. After a bit of to-and-fro she said I would need to contact the “Exceptions Team,” by phoning the Bank’s Call Centre and stating that fact. She typed the number for me. How quaint to be an Exception.
The bank’s phone-bot was even worse than Cora, being capable only of playing Twenty Questions ad nauseam. “Are you phoning about a loan?” (Press 2). “Are you phoning about your statement?” (Press 2). “Are you phoning about a standing order?” (Press 2 and shout “Put me through to a human, you moron!”
Eventually the machine got the point, and I was told I was in a queue for the next five minutes. The lady who answered was helpful, though her Indian accent wasn’t the most comprehensible after an hour, by now, of frustration, and she agreed to put me through to the Exceptions Team. The new bot told me that the queue for this was half an hour (and helpfully told me every few minutes that they were experiencing an unusually high volume of calls at the moment, which has happened on every call-centre call I’ve ever made).
Eventually, I was able to explain the situation to a human being, who told me that in order to remedy the situation, I would have to cancel my existing application (which by now was almost impossible to find on the proliferating nest of screens on my browser), and, once I’d achieved that, that somebody would phone me back to start again. On the question of ID, I would have to take my documents to the nearest branch. When I said it would help if it wasn’t sixteen miles away, she replied that people complain about that all the time. Well, yes, but what difference does it make?
So, after a fruitless 90 minutes and even more angst than I’d anticipated at the beginning (and I’d factored in a bucketful), I waited in all day for a call that eventually came at 7.30pm, after I’d given it up as a bad job, put the paperwork away, and researched credit unions.
Now, at this point I spoke to a bright young Irish guy with a good sense of humour, and the still-lengthy process (including the obligatory reading of red-tape) was actually quite pleasant. It’s just a shame that nothing on the bank’s website provided a route to this outcome, even if I had started the day with the knowledge that the bank considers smartphones obligatory, though it doesn’t say so up-front.
That is to say, it appears to be deliberate policy to make the process a kind of punishment for technophobia or, in my case, for the conscious decision not to have my every move tracked and be tempted to live my whole life tapping a screen. Incidentally, even kids in my young people’s group say they wish the smartphone hadn’t been invented. Tough, youngsters – resistance is futile.
I leave aside the problem that the local banking hub, which it turns out can validate ID (though it has no phone number to ascertain that fact) can only do so on Thursdays, though the website implies it is open every day (which it is, but only for routine counter services). So that journey on Monday was wasted time, too.
All in all, though, I have more than a strong suspicion that everything from the missing information on the bank’s website to the process itself is designed as a “nudge” sufficiently irksome to make a majority of people say, “To hell with it, I’ll get a bloody iPhone, then.” It’s part of today’s pattern of authorities making every day more stressful than the last.
With what motive? Well, of course, money for staff costs comes into it. It’s a lot cheaper to have three people manning the national call centre, and a load of technology spinning yarns about heavy traffic, and purporting to answer your questions by Artificial Incompetence, than it is to pay enough people to cater those who want to deal with humans.
But there’s much more money, and more power, to be gained by nudging the nation towards the Digital ID that nobody, apart from Keir Starmer and Bill Gates, actually wants. One database to rule them all, into which everybody is plugged. That’s why, I imagine, they even closed off the desktop web-cam option. The more that phones are perceived as an indispensable convenience (which is easy if all your branches are closed and every other option is made prohibitively inconvenient) the more the proles are controlled.
The Indian assistant I spoke to, when I suggested that they didn’t seem to want new customers, even admitted that the system was intended to “encourage” digital interactions – I guess in the same way that Muslim conquerors taking 50% of your wealth in jizya “encouraged” Christians to convert to Islam.
To return to my introduction, I guess it’s even possible that the banks, anticipating the collapse of the fiat currencies, really don’t want customers. I’m told that the banks are busy buying up real estate – particularly from landlords fleeing the government’s draconian new rental laws. Big banks will find ways to make big profits from real estate if their historic mismanagement leads to a Big Crash.
