Back in the ‘good old days’, if you wanted to draw out some cash to buy a motor, send a house deposit, or move a large amount of dosh, you physically walked into a bank branch.
Armed with a chequebook and passport, you’d use a pen on a cord to write and sign your cheque. The teller would dig out your original signature mandate from a filing cabinet out the back. You had a brief heart flutter as you realised your signature doesn’t quite look like that anymore. But, the fearless teller would check your passport, have a chat about the weather while typing some malarkey into a terminal, bonk the cheque, and you were done.
Quaint. Unsustainable in the modern world.
But is our digital world of banking apps and call centres really such an upgrade?
No. I am not writing this on April 1st. You will know from my posts that I am a big tech and AI evangelist.
But, this week, after the Trump tariffs, Wednesday became a big buying day in the US markets – look at what the herd is doing and try to do the opposite.
I was trying to shuffle liquid money between my own accounts. Left hand to right hand stuff to desperately get funds into my investment account.
Cue: Legacy bank fraud team theatre.
Several calls later and despite logging in with the right MFA credentials, I found myself justifying every step of my financial life.
Yes, it’s my decision to transfer the money.
No, no one else is on the call.
Yes, those are the correct recipient details – I’m literally logged into the receiving account now.
No, I opened the account over a year ago.
Yes, I accept full responsibility if it’s a scam.
The purpose? Rearranging funds [it’s actually none of your business].
Begging for access to my own funds.
I understand the fraud risk. But when I’m sending money to myself… shouldn’t the receiving bank be the one asking questions if it then goes somewhere suspicious?
Which brings me back to the original question: Has digital banking made things easier? Or just more time consuming and frustrating?
Surely, AI can fix this.
People assume we want to speak to a human. But I’d happily talk to anyTHING that could handle this in 5 minutes instead of the 30 minutes it took each time.
As I get older, I’m finding it harder to decipher accents over low quality VoIP lines.
Maybe AI isn’t yet mature enough to handle the logical progression of anti-fraud Q&A. How many times have you shouted at a chatbot in frustration while typing, ‘Connect me to a human operator?’
But surely it CAN now convert call speech into BBC English: both for the operator to me AND my Essex English translated into proppa English back to the operator.
Or maybe, one day soon, we’ll be walking into a virtual bank branch in some Second Life / Altered Carbon-style metaverse… to sign a digital cheque.
What do you think?