Banks are barstards... dont we all know!

Here is a well written, and informed article, about the scumbag behaviour of banks, and their greedy behaviour.
Having been a victim of NAB in the past, and their absolute greed, and ruthlessness in recovering a percieved debt...."Yes sir, you failed in your card security by daring to go to the shop for 15 minutes, and allowing thieving mongrels to raid your house" type stuff, I think the banks suck.
With a passion forthwith.
So, choke on your endless lust for greed, and profits, you pack of human vermin, you.....
As small banks innovate, the big four salivate
When I first joined St George, the biggest building society in the late '80s, it was a strange place to work. People smiled, everyone wore name badges, and you were just as likely to chat with the managing director in the lift as the mailroom manager. The company mascot was a big lizard who danced with a cabaret singer … and this was a place to invest your money?
There were two important people you had to impress to get any proposal through - the managing director and Betty Blacktown. I never met Betty; she was a fictional embodiment of our customers. The branch staff were more loyal to their regulars than to any head office directive.
And they still are.
St George and mid-tier banks such as Advance Bank are important to banking. They had to innovate to overcome the price advantage the big four held. For instance, St George was among the first to extend branch opening hours, and launch ATMs, the Visa debit card and a call centre that approved personal loans. It introduced Home Loan Centres, Sunday trading and split-rate loans. Its pensioner account surpassed anything the others reluctantly offered.
Reverse mortgages were available at Advance in the early '90s; line-of-credit equity loans were introduced by Citibank before renovating became a ratings winner. State Bank's All-In account was the best transaction account ever. And smiling John Symonds had them coming with mortgages to your home.
At St George we looked at what Advance and State Bank were doing for motivation and overseas for inspiration. The big four were only a source of disgruntled customers.
When the treasurer Paul Keating stepped forward to protect the four monolithic pillars, NAB started to circle. It set up the mid-tiers as appetisers, and St George was an attractive target. It had a major market share of home loans in NSW. And although the high level of training and service meant its staff-to-cost ratio was ridiculously high, profits kept climbing.
It seemed only market analysts didn't value service, although people did. In customer service ratings, Advance and St George were about 20points ahead of the fatuous four, and we laughed when ANZ had to offer people money to prove they could be served while still standing.
They were heady times as the CEO, a banking pugilist, Jim Sweeney, fought tooth and nail to protect Julie and the Dragon from disappearing. NAB's CEO Don Argus wouldn't return his calls, and the reality of survival meant merging with Advance Bank.
Changes affect a corporation's culture. When St George converted to a bank, Betty died a quiet death. Mediocre middle managers pursued fee income instead of efficiency. After the merge with Advance, staff ratios were driven down; new ideas were carefully costed and had to go past a committee of financial scrutineers, who would ask, "No one else is doing this. Why are we?"
Branches were closed, Julie took her singing to the clubs and Happy Dragon now works for the footy team. St George acted like a big bank; they were just so much nicer about it, and a lot of that comes back to its customer-driven ethic.
If you look over the banking landscape of the last decade, it is hard to find new products, but you won't be surprised at their source: no-deposit loans came from St George, low-doc loans came from mortgage brokers, reverse mortgages were popularised by Bluestone.
The big guys' focus has been on innovating with channels (read: websites) and their wealth creation arms (read: financial planning) who only talk to those with a few hundred thousand in assets. Competition now comes from new players, like ING and BankWest.
Of the big four, Westpac is the best placed to handle banking's happy dragon land.
The Commonwealth produces innovative ads and little else. ANZ's innovative claim is to reopen the branches they once closed. NAB has managed to slip from first to second seamlessly, and their culture was described as arrogant and deceptive during the Forex trading fiasco. They once looked to St George with a view to ruthlessly cutting its costs, although some say it was because they wanted to learn how the dragon did it.
I doubt Mrs Kelly would be splurging on a strong brand to gut it back to its bones. Shareholders will be bigger winners than customers, but that is the way for banking these days. Branches will surely close once computer systems are integrated, and many HR bunnies will go once some retrenching is done, as well as the usual overlapping back room functions.
From experience, Westpac has a similarly family-friendly culture to the old dragon, and it didn't take long for Mrs Kelly to see the profit in combining strength with its customer-friendly ways.
The question is whether Westpac milks it, or mines it. With good service in short supply let's hope it's the latter. Even shareholders like a smile.
Con Nats worked at St George from 1989 to 1996. He is a freelance marketing and finance writer

And now for something totally different....

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capitalKINSHASA (Reuters)
Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic, and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.
Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.
"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.
"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.
Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.
"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Politically correct stupidity.............

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Nappy-headed hos," the phrase that cost radio shock jock Don Imus his job and triggered a debate on how far free speech can go, was named on Thursday as the most egregious politically incorrect turn of phrase in 2007.
Trailing behind that phrase in the annual survey by Global Language Monitor (www.LanguageMonitor.com), a word usage group, were "Ho-Ho-Ho" and "Carbon Footprint Stomping," said the group's president Paul JJ Payack.
"Ho-Ho-Ho" made the list after a staffing company in Sydney, Australia suggested to prospective Santas they drop their traditional greeting in favor of "Ha-Ha-Ha" so as not to invoke images of the derogatory slang term for women.
"Carbon Footprint Stomping" is a phrase used to describe flaunting environmentally "green" activities by doing things like driving gas-guzzling Hummers and flying private jets, which in these energy-conscious times might be considered the height of political incorrectness.
New York-based Imus was fired from his popular morning radio program by CBS in April 2007 after a national controversy erupted over his use of the "Nappy-headed" phrase to describe the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Imus later apologized and met with the team to ask for forgiveness.
Last November, he was hired by a different network.
"It is no surprise that 'Nappy-headed hos' was selected as the top politically incorrect word or phrase for 2007," said Payack. "A year later that phrase is still ricocheting about the Internet, even affecting Christmas-season Santas in Australia "
Among other examples on the list are:
"Fire-breathing Dragon" -- Children's book author Lindsey Gardiner was asked to eliminate a fire-breathing dragon from her new book because publishers feared they could be sued under health and safety regulations.
"Wucha dun did now?" -- The subtitle of a "Ghetto Handbook" distributed by a Houston school district police officer to enable readers to speak "as if you just came out of the 'hood."
"Gypsy skirt" -- The colorful layered skirt was given a new name, "Traveler Skirt," since police in Cornwall, a county in southwest England, believed the term "Gypsy Skirt" might be considered offensive to Gypsies.
Only in the western world have we got time to worry about all this guff........
Strewth...ho ho ho...grow up you lot....
And fire breathing dragons against OH and S?
Safety has become a religion in itself these days, creating a massive industry in generating bollocks, destroying trees to cover all the paperwork needed, and insuring that some very fat, nasty lazy bludgers who are vastly overpaid stay, well, fat lazy bludgers who are vastly overpaid.
In our beloved rail industry, they want to close one of our important rail yards at midnight, to freight trains, as Failcorp is sick of paying overtime of one or two hours a night and the odd taxi fare for the officer there.
Yet, in a huge safety bottom feeling session, Failcorp are renting out the Darling Harbour convention centre for two days, to sit around and postulate about, well, safety.
The only safe time for huge pissup, and a bit more diversity network lezzo loving!
Strewth!
No wonder our trains just dont run like they should.....sometimes they dont run at all!
And when they dont, thats the safest of all!