👋 I have a fun unintended-batman 🦇 story of my friend to share:
There is a bank in Czechia that is known for its incompetence and bad customer service. But let's keept it anonymous and just call it Reiffeisen.
This bank is so bad that they closed my friend's personal account once because his name was also attached to a business account of one entity that decided to move to another bank.
The same friend eventually decided to go through the hassle of moving a bank and closed his account for good (voluntarily this time). He's been not their client for more than ~5 years when our story started.
*Phone rings
🧔: Yello
🏦: Hello, this is Raiffeisenbank. You've been our client at one point.
🧔: Correct, and I've never been happier since closing my account at yours.
🏦: Nice. So now we've been trying to open an account with a new client of ours, but our systems show that their phone number X is registered to your old account.
🧔: Yup, that's possible. I've given up that number years ago. So maybe it got recycled and someone else got it.
🏦: And now since the number is still registered to your account, we can't use it to setup new account for this client of ours.
🧔: Ok, sooo?
🏦: So would you be so kind and remove it from your account?
🧔: So you're telling me that if I don't do this, then this person won't be able to bank with you?
🏦: Exactly!
🧔: Excellent. If this is the only good deed I can do this year, then I'm more then happy to help with it!
🏦: So you're...
🧔: Absolutely never going to remove that phone number from my account. Preventing that poor soul from the dreadful experience of yours. Bye!
* Hangs up
#Banking #Banks #Reiffeisen #ReiffeisenBank #customerservice
Great story!
The preview text is a mess – I suggest visiting the link.
The elephant in the room is the injustice of banks mandating disclosure of phone numbers (thus excluding people without phones and people who have a healthy objection to sharing their phone number with businesses). Then the fact that phone numbers are used as human identifiers. That bank is likely vulnerable to theft with their reliance on phone numbers as a unique identifier.