The Joke is on Indian Banking

With the ICICI's of  India heralding the technology revolution in Indian banking, one would hope everything is moving in the right direction for customers. And that is indeed true so far as the spread of banking and their ability to touch the lives of people in remote parts of the country is concerned. But, I am not sure if any of our prominent bankers or the market has publicly acknowledged or even taken note of the impact these changes have had on the core concept of Banking. Gone are the days you could walk into a Bank and expect to talk to someone who understands or even knows what he is talking about.

Ms Chanda Kochar may be basking under the praise and attention she has been receiving Internationally as the head of India's leading Bank, and probably well deserved too. But she will do herself and her customers a great service by opening an account in her own bank and calling up the toll free number for help or even walk into a branch and engage anyone there in a conversation on any one of the numerous products they are hawking.  A five minute call or conversation will affirm the following - they have no clue what they are talking about, their knowledge has a narrow sales focus and they have no opinion, thought or clue on any other aspect of banking besides what they handle and lastly that each and every one of them can be easily replaced by an automaton.


I have banked with ICICI long enough to know that they have not always been this way. But they have been progressively getting worse over the last few years. A recent call to their call center confirmed that the transition is complete at last. I certainly hope this was a planned transition that the management team put in place, as it certainly will be the next most talked about new case study at our IIM's (after Laloo's Railway case study of course) . The plan is simply ingenious. Train your customers or force them to get used to dealing with human automatons, so that, one day they can lay off the whole work force and replace them with more personable robots. And I have to congratulate the management team of executing the plan to perfection. That day has arrived!


If you have any misgivings on the above theory, please call your ICICI Customer support for the smallest of issues you could have and they will be more than happy to dish out perfectly useless information, based on a set of rules. It doesn't matter if your circumstance is a little different, sorry the ICICI team didn't think you could be in such a situation and therefore the standard rule applies.  So then you think, its time to talk to a manager, this is where a little "discretion" may be required. And then the "automaton" theory will hit you in the face.  The manager of course has no idea what discretion means and simply repeats what the earlier guy said, only in better English.