Maravi

(HERALD) More creativity vital for banks

More creativity vital for banks

Despite the pressure to use swipe cards and cheques more often, most people still have to buy most of their groceries with cash, partly because swipe-card systems seem to be acting up and banks have problems updating them. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has returned to a more liberal attitude to cash, raising the daily withdrawal limit to $5 billion and issuing new bearer cheques so that this limit can be paid out in just twenty notes.

With the limited security features easily available for bearer cheques there are good arguments for keeping the maximum denomination reasonably low to make forgery less likely.

Few people would want to risk years in jail for round about the equivalent of US$1, so as long as the Reserve Bank keeps its maximum bearer at this sort of ballpark figure then there will be very little fraud.

But while the Reserve Bank has started moving in a direction to make life more convenient for the average person, the commercial banks and building societies are some way behind.

Getting enough money to buy a week’s groceries is a major operation, one that needs several hours much of the time.

For a start, most banks, although there are some honourable exceptions, are taking forever to update their ATMs. Far too many machines require multiple swipes to extract a few hundred million.

Yet these machines are designed to dispense up to 40 notes, which using the new top denomination would give $10 billion, twice the permitted maximum.

Thus, so far as the hardware is concerned, there is no reason why an ATM cannot give whatever a bank sets as the maximum ATM withdrawal with just one swipe.

There are good reasons, related to security, for banks to set more modest limits for cash withdrawals from ATMs than they might set from counters where tellers can demand positive identification.

People have been robbed of cards and forced to give the PIN and lost a day’s maximum. Zimbabwe is better off than most countries with a guard at each bank of ATMs, but the risk is there. However less than a billion for withdrawals is rather useless.

We presume some of the problem, besides sheer inertia, is software.

But supermarkets have all coped with the plethora of zeroes, giving prices and till slips in thousands or millions. We cannot see why banks cannot do the same if they have software limitations.

There is tendency among many Zimbabwean banks to want a perfect world, rather than doing what the rest of Zimbabwe does and work around the problems to make life as convenient as possible for their customers.

A bit more creativity from banks to be customer-friendly is now needed.

After all, they charge fees for all services these days and should stop acting as if customers were a nuisance.

Labels: BANKING, ZIMBABWE

posted by MrK @ 6:20 AM