Goodbye, Bank Account

Mundane things can confuse.  As an unrepentant pack rat, no matter how I keep records of bank accounts with small deposits, chances are I forget these until I race to avoid having them inactive.

At the periphery of joint accounts with the husband are my personal accounts of trickling deposits, which the husband gamely increases now and then but are otherwise solely dependent on my trifling personal allowance and more trifling rare incomes from writing.

Amazing though is how our banks for reasons that suit them best increase the maintaining balance and swallow what one has in one’s account that’s below their new minimum.  As a small depositor, I feel discriminated against.
With apologies to overworked bank employees, my experiences in banks are nothing to be cheerful about, except in three banks— Metrobank in Pasay Libertad and the DBP and FCB in Tagbilaran.

Politeness does wonders.  My Metrobank Pasay experience of goodwill I credit to the husband when we opened a current account.  His passport must be an illusionist of money.  (No regret here; there’s this legal mutual ownership, regardless of who brings home the bacon or dried fish.  Poor I may be, but so is he.)

Credit friendship with the spirited Melba ‘Bobbsey’ Manding-Buma-at of Tagbilaran’s DBP.  And it pays to be on a first-name basis with Argee Melisimo and GB Lumayag of FCB, not discounting that it’s one bank whose personnel is more gracious than others.

Otherwise, it’s as if unless one lugs a bucketful of cash, most ordinary and anonymous clients like me hardly merit a look in a bank.

With no job or business to speak of, I was turned down when I applied for a checking account by my lonesome in a Cebu bank.  I have my husband’s go-signal and my savings deposit in your bank can support a checking account, I explained.  The bank employee studied my passbook and had a solution— a credit card application.

Isn’t it silly?  I said.  You can’t trust me with a checking account that could land me in jail but you can trust me with borrowing?  To sweeten my coup de grâce, I added that I only want one credit card of one bank, and dropped their biggest bank rival’s name.

I opened a Cebu checking account in that rival bank, courtesy of an area manager who happens to be a college chum.   No interviews, no background checks, just other possibilities thrown into the package, ATM card and savings account included.

Along came the rub.  Less than a year ago, that particular savings account just had a little above the minimum maintaining balance.  That account is now nowhere.  The bank raised its minimum balance and deducted 200 pesos from my account every month until nothing was left.  Blazes.  No bank will give that much interest per month on the same balance amount.

As a depositor, and thus a lender to a bank, I was punished for not lending much.  They notify clients through letters, my friend said, though not those who are out of the country.  I wish your policies are not retroactive, I said, feeling sorry over my four-figure balance swallowed by the bank in less than a year.

There were no ads, no internet postings about the increase.  There could be hundreds like me; a windfall for the bank.  Such policies perhaps are contributory to why we’re not a saving country.  Our banking system is anti-small depositor, unlike Japan’s.

Years ago, a lawmaker was featured with his plan to legislate against the minimum maintaining balance in banks. There must be a powerful banking lobby because nary a squeak was heard from that legislator again.  Do banks lose if depositors have balances less than what banks peg as the minimum, which they increase at their whim anyway? You can open another savings account through the internet, my friend said apologetically.  Never again, my friend.  Your bank’s policy isn’t your fault, but this is the third time my deposit has been swallowed by a bank, so never again.

I’m far from being an Irish who can spew funny and creative curses, but with apologies to my friend too, I wish to say:  You, greedy Pacman of a bank, may you have many bank runs to come.

(31 Aug 2008)