Continuing the wonderfully insouciant trend of charging customers more for services they had previously gotten at little or no cost, Harris Bank has made it more difficult for customers to get free checking, requiring customers to fulfill any of a variety of conditions in order to avoid the $7 monthly fee for checking privileges.
While not altogether impossible to accomplish, nor even difficult, it is yet another incident of increased costs when there remains little justification for doing so; this announcement comes after Harris having announced increasing profits, while their parent company Bank of Montreal has done the same. Record profits have been seen all over the banking sector in recent years, in certain cases due to the taxpayer-funded bailouts, yet it is quite rare to read about a bank all of a sudden offering their services for half the price of the year previously. Abundantly clear are the intentions of the executives in the industry, in that they have more desire to please their shareholders or expand their own pocketbooks rather than compete as efficiently as possible.
The banking sector is a case of stifled competition, inherently; switching an account to a different bank is not nearly as simple as going to a different movie theater one particular day. Account inertia is a big deal. ATM networks are another significant factor. When customers want as little hassle as possibleâ€"â€"and the charges start coming directly out of their accounts so they don’t have to deal with any time-consuming chore of any kindâ€"â€"they will simply let the changes occur, and take the penalties.
It is perhaps something wrong with the larger corporate structure of America as a whole; CEO pay has risen since the economic crisis, whereas, for example, several Japanese CEOs have taken significant pay cuts to provide financial cushioning to their own companies while they weather the financial storm of whatever difficulty they face. Such is not the case with most large American corporations. Some, perhaps; but a rarity.
While Harris Bank likely has little to worry aboutâ€"â€"few people will jump ship due to a (somewhat avoidable) $7 monthly feeâ€"â€"why do it? Are they so hard-pressed for cash that they have to squeeze their customers in order to survive? Not likely. Their financial results as well as that of their parent company indicate that such was not an outright necessity. And were other options discussed for cost-reduction purposes, such as reducing executive salary? Lowering corporate expenditures of comped meals or business trip reimbursements, perhaps? Maybe. But hearing such reports in the American market is a rare event indeed.
As other banks seek to squeeze more profits from their customers, one would hope there arrives some solution that allows clients to use their own money without having to deal with someone else making money from them. And, given the wealth of online services currently available at low or no cost, it is likely only a matter of time before certain all-digital banks take over the market, offering free services of all kinds, operating entirely on ad revenue, as does the entire rest of the internet. Or perhaps some other strategy. Once someone figures out a good business model that requires no significant capital, the banking sector will wish they hadn’t bled customers so dry.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.world-class-articles.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
