The world's local wank

Marketers often place the horse firmly before the cart.

If you really think that spending millions on papering the world with fanciful tosh about your "brand" helps, it's not a bad idea to make sure that the reality approximates, however vaguely, to the promise.

As one of our friends has just discovered, this is often not the case.

She is moving from Rome to Paris, having previously worked here in London, where she still has a flat. So the other day, having arranged to rent the flat, she wandered into her London branch of HSBC - rather pleased that being with "the world's local bank" it would be no problem opening an account in Paris.

They had a queue there, of course, to direct you to the right place to do what you want when you enter. I have never understood why you can no longer go and ask any cashier as we used to, but still. I suspect the banks' high-ups now operate on the assumption that the customers and the staff are as moronic as they have so spectacularly proved themselves to be. Or maybe they just think we prefer machines to people. Personally, I don't. And I also think that if their employees were given credit for being intelligent, they would rise to the challenge. Not everyone is as thick as a senior banker. That would be impossible.

When she asked the man whose job it was to help how she could open her new French account, he was quite at a loss. It seemed as though nobody in the world's local bank had ever told him such a bizarre question might come up.

So he said he would go and find out more about what was involved, and give her a number to call - which he did - but if she wished she could join a queue of people waiting to find out the answers to such tricky questions. How long, she wondered, would that take? He said he would go and find that out too, and trotted off.

In the meantime another helpful employee sidled up and said "If you open it here they'll charge you £100. You should wait till you get to Paris." Then the man came back and said if she wanted to join the queue it would take an hour to an hour and a half. There's service for you, eh?

Well, if the world's local bank can't even handle a simple thing like that, where do you go? Your local kebab stand? It seems that like all the other banks, besides not doing too well on the basics of lending and borrowing - thus landing us all in the shit - HSBC can't even manage the simplest of tasks in what they claim to be their area of special expertise without trying to rip you off.

So she is going to see what happens when she gets to Paris. I'm sure she won't have to wait too long before they try to rip her off too. Though oddly enough when I had an account with a French bank, they were efficient, helpful and no more rapacious than you might expect.

They even entertained all us customers in the village hall once a year, with lots of free booze. On balance, I think I'd prefer my local bank to be local, thank you.

I also think that before you claim to be anything, you do it. When we get a client, we ask them what makes them different or better than their competitors, not what they fondly imagine should make them so; and we don't just take their word for it: whenever possible we try to see if it is true.