Seeing like a bank
November 8, 2023 5:08 AM Subscribe
Society has goals which conflict with banks being good at banking “ Plausibly, we should decide to stop doing the thing that no one wants us to do. And, as a particular thing which could help unlock that: if one cares a lot about the experience of people at the socioeconomic margins, one should perhaps spend less time fulminating about greedy capitalists and spend more time reading Requests For Public Comment by relatively obscure parts of the administrative state.”
“ Although it certainly doesn’t feel like it to people who hit edge cases, the tiered support model is a technology which took us decades to popularize and which made the world much better. It brought down the cost of financial services and supported product innovation which would have been impossible under the mid-century bank staffing model. We could not have credit cards or discount brokerages without the tiered support model. The biography of Charles Schwab makes this point persuasively at considerable length: competent telephone operations were instrumental to bringing equity ownership to the middle class. You should prefer a world with credit cards and discount brokerages to one which doesn’t have them, even as you listen to hold music occasionally.”
“ Although it certainly doesn’t feel like it to people who hit edge cases, the tiered support model is a technology which took us decades to popularize and which made the world much better. It brought down the cost of financial services and supported product innovation which would have been impossible under the mid-century bank staffing model. We could not have credit cards or discount brokerages without the tiered support model. The biography of Charles Schwab makes this point persuasively at considerable length: competent telephone operations were instrumental to bringing equity ownership to the middle class. You should prefer a world with credit cards and discount brokerages to one which doesn’t have them, even as you listen to hold music occasionally.”
Thanks for posting this - "Bits About Money" is always an interesting read.
posted by Umami Dearest at 5:50 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Umami Dearest at 5:50 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Our credit union gradually became a bank, for all intents and purposes
posted by mecran01 at 6:11 AM on November 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by mecran01 at 6:11 AM on November 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
I work at a mid-size bank that's in the middle of both a merger and a huge upgrade to our technology, in hopes of getting some of the systems to talk to each other, and boy oh boy does this ring true.
Something he didn't touch on is that to have a central-ish system that interfaces with the various third party applications we use, we sometimes need those third party applications to make a change, and they won't. Ever. Why would they? They have a stranglehold on the industry and once a bank makes a choice like Fiserv or Jack Henry or FIS, it's baked in to everything. I would rather start a bank over from scratch than to try to change which core we use. They're not at all motivated to make changes (and why should they be, a change is mostly risk to them, with very little upside) and so we can't connect our central hub to the system of record for entire lines of business.
Anyway, passed this around to the team and got a "I'm in this photo and I don't like it" almost immediately.
posted by punchtothehead at 6:18 AM on November 8, 2023 [20 favorites]
Something he didn't touch on is that to have a central-ish system that interfaces with the various third party applications we use, we sometimes need those third party applications to make a change, and they won't. Ever. Why would they? They have a stranglehold on the industry and once a bank makes a choice like Fiserv or Jack Henry or FIS, it's baked in to everything. I would rather start a bank over from scratch than to try to change which core we use. They're not at all motivated to make changes (and why should they be, a change is mostly risk to them, with very little upside) and so we can't connect our central hub to the system of record for entire lines of business.
Anyway, passed this around to the team and got a "I'm in this photo and I don't like it" almost immediately.
posted by punchtothehead at 6:18 AM on November 8, 2023 [20 favorites]
Swift, I think they're referring to this part:
Now, there's a valid point there that staff hours dealing with this is a large expense, and thus a big target for cost-cutting MBA's to salami slice. Thus introducing tier 1 support and even automated tier 0 support to deal with the routine questions (and gatekeeping higher tiers to deal with the more complex issues) and also making sure that individual teams only deal with one class of issues at all, and indeed offshoring, thus cutting salary costs (and headcount) all round, big bonuses for the MBAs etc and a miserable experience for customers and support agents alike.
And IT systems integration, oh boy. That's true everywhere, for every type of business. Ensuring that the customer support staff have accurate access to the relevant information, and indeed have the power & ability to actual identify and resolve issues, rather than them being isolated in another silo/absorbed competitor systems/different department customer service team, let alone getting all the systems to agree (and not end up with multiple, conflicting copies of bits of information in different systems) is a hard, hard problem since many such systems were never designed to talk to each other, can differ in age by decades, and all the decision makers have no idea what their systems even really do or how they operate, made significantly harder by customer service, and IT, being costs to cut, not a profit centre.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:26 AM on November 8, 2023 [27 favorites]
Some customers do not understand why a $45 charge and a $32 charge would overdraw an account with $70 in it. The bank will not be more effective at educating them on this than the public school system was given a budget of $100,000 and 12 years to try. This customer calls the bank much more frequently than you do. You can understand why, right? From their perspective, they were just going about their life, doing nothing wrong, and then for some bullshit reason the bank charged them $35.As someone who's been in IT Support of some variation for my entire career, that guy issues usually utterly dominate every customer-facing ticket queue/retail counter/telephone support system you can imagine. The ones that are nice-but-dim are usually fairly time-consuming, but otherwise straightforward. The ones who are nasty-and-dim are a major problem as well as a HUGE timesink. And they also tend to lie. I'm sure anyone with customer-facing retail/food experience will recognise the type.
The reason you have to “jump through hoops” to “simply talk to someone” (a professional, with meaningful decisionmaking authority) is because the system is set up to a) try to dissuade that guy from speaking to someone whose time is expensive and b) believes, on the basis of voluminous evidence, that you are likely that guy until proven otherwise."
Now, there's a valid point there that staff hours dealing with this is a large expense, and thus a big target for cost-cutting MBA's to salami slice. Thus introducing tier 1 support and even automated tier 0 support to deal with the routine questions (and gatekeeping higher tiers to deal with the more complex issues) and also making sure that individual teams only deal with one class of issues at all, and indeed offshoring, thus cutting salary costs (and headcount) all round, big bonuses for the MBAs etc and a miserable experience for customers and support agents alike.
And IT systems integration, oh boy. That's true everywhere, for every type of business. Ensuring that the customer support staff have accurate access to the relevant information, and indeed have the power & ability to actual identify and resolve issues, rather than them being isolated in another silo/absorbed competitor systems/different department customer service team, let alone getting all the systems to agree (and not end up with multiple, conflicting copies of bits of information in different systems) is a hard, hard problem since many such systems were never designed to talk to each other, can differ in age by decades, and all the decision makers have no idea what their systems even really do or how they operate, made significantly harder by customer service, and IT, being costs to cut, not a profit centre.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 6:26 AM on November 8, 2023 [27 favorites]
competent telephone operations were instrumental to bringing equity ownership to the middle class. You should prefer a world with credit cards and discount brokerages to one which doesn’t have them, even as you listen to hold music occasionally.
I have so many reactions to this article, but let's focus on this one fragment for now, because there's a whole lot happening in very little space.
First, we're uncritically informed in passing that bringing equity ownership to the middle class was inherently a good thing. I beg to differ. The last century has cheerfully shown us, over and over, what a goddamn disaster equity ownership in general is (c.f. stock market crashes and the commoditization of everything), but specifically how horrible it's been for the middle class. How does the middle class access equity ownership? It's not through their E-Trade accounts, unless you're drawing your dividers between "middle class" and "upper class" very creatively. It's through their 401(k)s, which replaced pensions as the general means of retirement savings. The stock market was once the purview of the wealthy elite; now it's important to everyone, because you can watch the vicissitudes of the market as Reddit screws with cryptocurrency or GameStop and tanks your retirement savings.
Next, I'll gesture vaguely to a timeline of the 20th century, and how credit cards appeared well before the modern version of 3-tiered phone support. Even if we totally ignore the inherent value of credit cards (and given their predatory nature, to say nothing of how much unsecured debt the average American holds, that's quite a concession), the idea that modern financial instruments couldn't exist without shitty automated call systems is absolutely absurd. It's a cost-savings measure, through and through, but it's not like banks are known for the razor-thin margins they operate on. Boo-hoo, financial institutions who have to answer the phone when The Poors call to ask about the ruinous overdraft fees they were charged by predatory algorithms, you'll just have to subsidize your call center operating costs with those $150K/year clients we hear about a few paragraphs later.
Nor are automated phone systems and 3-tiered support models necessarily connected. Every time I call my pharmacy to figure out why they haven't filled the same goddamn prescription I've gotten every month for six years, I get to navigate the same phone tree, which is now voice-activated solely to make it more difficult for users to speak to an actual human. Is that degradation of service necessary to keep the pharmacy open? Of fucking course not, but I bet it lets them staff one fewer person at the completely-overwhelmed pharmacy counter, and they're betting it's not enough to make many customers switch pharmacies (which wouldn't make a difference because all their competitors started doing exactly the same thing at the same time, which is in no way suspicious or anti-competitive). I don't call the bank nearly as often as I call the pharmacy, but according to this guy they're all using the same model of support, and they're all for damn sure doing it for the same reason, which is to squeeze every last cent out of the support centers that they're legally required to operate if they want to comply with federal law.
In conclusion, this guy sure does like carrying water for a sociopathic bunch of capitalists who would happily grind him into cattle feed if they could make $5 off of it.
posted by Mayor West at 6:29 AM on November 8, 2023 [83 favorites]
I have so many reactions to this article, but let's focus on this one fragment for now, because there's a whole lot happening in very little space.
First, we're uncritically informed in passing that bringing equity ownership to the middle class was inherently a good thing. I beg to differ. The last century has cheerfully shown us, over and over, what a goddamn disaster equity ownership in general is (c.f. stock market crashes and the commoditization of everything), but specifically how horrible it's been for the middle class. How does the middle class access equity ownership? It's not through their E-Trade accounts, unless you're drawing your dividers between "middle class" and "upper class" very creatively. It's through their 401(k)s, which replaced pensions as the general means of retirement savings. The stock market was once the purview of the wealthy elite; now it's important to everyone, because you can watch the vicissitudes of the market as Reddit screws with cryptocurrency or GameStop and tanks your retirement savings.
Next, I'll gesture vaguely to a timeline of the 20th century, and how credit cards appeared well before the modern version of 3-tiered phone support. Even if we totally ignore the inherent value of credit cards (and given their predatory nature, to say nothing of how much unsecured debt the average American holds, that's quite a concession), the idea that modern financial instruments couldn't exist without shitty automated call systems is absolutely absurd. It's a cost-savings measure, through and through, but it's not like banks are known for the razor-thin margins they operate on. Boo-hoo, financial institutions who have to answer the phone when The Poors call to ask about the ruinous overdraft fees they were charged by predatory algorithms, you'll just have to subsidize your call center operating costs with those $150K/year clients we hear about a few paragraphs later.
Nor are automated phone systems and 3-tiered support models necessarily connected. Every time I call my pharmacy to figure out why they haven't filled the same goddamn prescription I've gotten every month for six years, I get to navigate the same phone tree, which is now voice-activated solely to make it more difficult for users to speak to an actual human. Is that degradation of service necessary to keep the pharmacy open? Of fucking course not, but I bet it lets them staff one fewer person at the completely-overwhelmed pharmacy counter, and they're betting it's not enough to make many customers switch pharmacies (which wouldn't make a difference because all their competitors started doing exactly the same thing at the same time, which is in no way suspicious or anti-competitive). I don't call the bank nearly as often as I call the pharmacy, but according to this guy they're all using the same model of support, and they're all for damn sure doing it for the same reason, which is to squeeze every last cent out of the support centers that they're legally required to operate if they want to comply with federal law.
In conclusion, this guy sure does like carrying water for a sociopathic bunch of capitalists who would happily grind him into cattle feed if they could make $5 off of it.
posted by Mayor West at 6:29 AM on November 8, 2023 [83 favorites]
Yeah. The sentence that jumped out at me was "It is why a high school student with a paper route can open a checking account, get a debit card, and start buying things on Amazon". Sure.
posted by phooky at 6:37 AM on November 8, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by phooky at 6:37 AM on November 8, 2023 [13 favorites]
I thought this was fascinating, and while I could argue about some of the premises the author includes the explanation based on those premises was enlightening.
posted by Wretch729 at 6:40 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Wretch729 at 6:40 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
Is it just me or is anyone else having a lot of trouble figuring out what the fuck this article is even about? I have read about half of it and I *still* don't know what the "problem" is that this writer is trying to explain because he keeps going off on really disgusting, ableist, racist, xenophobic tangential rants about how dumb people are??
I thought it was going to be about why the banks closed those people's accounts and that the answer was related to banks having no memory of past interactions with customers. That's what the first and second paragraphs of the article set out.
Then they spent a lot of paragraphs talking about how customer information is not shared willy-nilly to everyone who works at the bank but rather it is doled out in small pieces on a need-to-know basis to people who have authorization. Okayyyy. I'm still wondering why this caused people's accounts to be closed, but at least this is on-topic for the promise made in the first section.
And then things start getting very very weird.
There comes a point the writer is explaining the tiered customer support system - like, Tier 1 customer service reps (whom you always reach first when you call a bank, presumably after Tier 0 which is the automated system) handle very basic requests and Tier 3 reps who are harder to reach handle complicated customer issues. This is kinda sorta marginally tangentially relevant to the article's point, I guess???? Because it might be connected to the larger point of how customer information might not be available to Tier 1 reps???? It's getting to be a stretch by now, because jesus christ, "customer data needs to be kept private even from random bank employees" isn't a point that needs to be belabored this much, but I was willing to reach right along with the writer...
Except he doesn't reach. It turns out this writer has zero interest in connecting anything to his larger point. He wants to go into the discussion of Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 support purely to get a Peak Dudebro rant off his chest about how smart he personally is and how dumb everyone else is. He starts with:
> You truly haven’t lived until you’ve tried paying for your college education by being a Tier One customer service representative, like your humble correspondent did.
and segues into:
> The reason Tier One exists is that ... [usually the problem experienced by the] ... retail user is not actually a problem. That retail user is extremely unsophisticated about the bank account, finance in general, and frequently many other things in life. Tier One exists to handhold this individual ...
and
> Some people are not as intelligent as you are. That is uncouth to say. In the United States, almost every large organization will institutionally tamp down on any explicit discussion of it. They all must structure their affairs to deal with the reality of it, though.
and
> Think of the person from your grade school classes who had the most difficulty at everything. The U.S. expects banks to service people much, much less intelligent than them.
and
>And so every Tier One rep will talk to dozens of folks a day. Many of those calls are… fairly aggravating, from the perspective of the agent.
This writer spends, I shit you not, SIX LONG PARAGRAPHS and OVER SIX HUNDRED WORDS whining about how stupid people are so dumb and so annoying and so uuugghh. What the fuck does this have to do with anything?
And lest you think this man's only sin is his insufferable supercilious smarter-than-thou ableism, let me note that these aforementioned six paragraphs also include rants about non-english speaking customers trying to do business with english speaking banks. He includes them in his list of annoying callers who are too unsophisticated to be tolerated by the likes of himself.
Why am I here? What am I reading? Why am I wasting my life reading this asshole's thoughts on *anything*?
I find myself perversely curious about whether he ever gets to the point of explaining why banks closed customer accounts (remember??? the problem set out in Paragraph 1??? The supposed reason for this article to exist??) so if someone wants to tell me, that'd be nice!
posted by MiraK at 6:43 AM on November 8, 2023 [47 favorites]
I thought it was going to be about why the banks closed those people's accounts and that the answer was related to banks having no memory of past interactions with customers. That's what the first and second paragraphs of the article set out.
Then they spent a lot of paragraphs talking about how customer information is not shared willy-nilly to everyone who works at the bank but rather it is doled out in small pieces on a need-to-know basis to people who have authorization. Okayyyy. I'm still wondering why this caused people's accounts to be closed, but at least this is on-topic for the promise made in the first section.
And then things start getting very very weird.
There comes a point the writer is explaining the tiered customer support system - like, Tier 1 customer service reps (whom you always reach first when you call a bank, presumably after Tier 0 which is the automated system) handle very basic requests and Tier 3 reps who are harder to reach handle complicated customer issues. This is kinda sorta marginally tangentially relevant to the article's point, I guess???? Because it might be connected to the larger point of how customer information might not be available to Tier 1 reps???? It's getting to be a stretch by now, because jesus christ, "customer data needs to be kept private even from random bank employees" isn't a point that needs to be belabored this much, but I was willing to reach right along with the writer...
Except he doesn't reach. It turns out this writer has zero interest in connecting anything to his larger point. He wants to go into the discussion of Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 support purely to get a Peak Dudebro rant off his chest about how smart he personally is and how dumb everyone else is. He starts with:
> You truly haven’t lived until you’ve tried paying for your college education by being a Tier One customer service representative, like your humble correspondent did.
and segues into:
> The reason Tier One exists is that ... [usually the problem experienced by the] ... retail user is not actually a problem. That retail user is extremely unsophisticated about the bank account, finance in general, and frequently many other things in life. Tier One exists to handhold this individual ...
and
> Some people are not as intelligent as you are. That is uncouth to say. In the United States, almost every large organization will institutionally tamp down on any explicit discussion of it. They all must structure their affairs to deal with the reality of it, though.
and
> Think of the person from your grade school classes who had the most difficulty at everything. The U.S. expects banks to service people much, much less intelligent than them.
and
>And so every Tier One rep will talk to dozens of folks a day. Many of those calls are… fairly aggravating, from the perspective of the agent.
This writer spends, I shit you not, SIX LONG PARAGRAPHS and OVER SIX HUNDRED WORDS whining about how stupid people are so dumb and so annoying and so uuugghh. What the fuck does this have to do with anything?
And lest you think this man's only sin is his insufferable supercilious smarter-than-thou ableism, let me note that these aforementioned six paragraphs also include rants about non-english speaking customers trying to do business with english speaking banks. He includes them in his list of annoying callers who are too unsophisticated to be tolerated by the likes of himself.
Why am I here? What am I reading? Why am I wasting my life reading this asshole's thoughts on *anything*?
I find myself perversely curious about whether he ever gets to the point of explaining why banks closed customer accounts (remember??? the problem set out in Paragraph 1??? The supposed reason for this article to exist??) so if someone wants to tell me, that'd be nice!
posted by MiraK at 6:43 AM on November 8, 2023 [47 favorites]
Isn't the solution a Post Office Bank.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:46 AM on November 8, 2023 [35 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:46 AM on November 8, 2023 [35 favorites]
"It is why a high school student with a paper route can open a checking account, get a debit card, and start buying things on Amazon".
I'm pretty sure high school students with paper routes went extinct, like, thirty years ago.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:49 AM on November 8, 2023 [24 favorites]
I'm pretty sure high school students with paper routes went extinct, like, thirty years ago.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:49 AM on November 8, 2023 [24 favorites]
The article is interesting, but I also think there are a few things which aren’t evidenced, such as why precisely banks couldn’t operate while providing good customer service to everyone, particularly when credit unions reliably demonstrate that they can. I have USAA; reliably the Tier 1 person can reverse fees and take time resolving the problem, and somehow it hasn’t gone out of business yet.
posted by corb at 6:58 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by corb at 6:58 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
I thought I recognized the rather distinctive writing style - this is the same guy who wrote Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You (it's linked partway through this article), which I had bookmarked as an interesting resource.
posted by allegedly at 7:03 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by allegedly at 7:03 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
MiraK, he does. It's due to the requirement for banks to monitor for fraud and money laundering. Banks are required to file SARs - suspicious activity reports - for certain kinds of activities. It's not optional. The bank can't tell the subject of a SAR that they're the subject of a SAR. They're not even supposed to reject the transaction, because doing so would tip off the subject. At my bank, the only people who know when a SAR is filed is the person who files it and the head of AML/Risk.
What is optional is the point at which a SAR or multiple SARs becomes enough to close an account, and that's sometimes up to the bank, sometimes not. Doing business with someone who is committing fraud or money laundering could cost us a lot of money in fines and/or business, so banks accept a certain number of false positives rather than letting it happen. But the problems experienced here by the people whose accounts were closed - and I agree that the writer doesn't do a great job of connecting these pieces - is that there's nothing in any system that would indicate why the account was closed (if for a suspicious activity) and that the various systems that might contain a reason (if for non-suspicious activities) may be invisible to certain customer service tiers.
seanmpuckett Post Office Bank would still need to monitor for fraud, money laundering, and terrorism, especially given that more customers of such would deal in cash transactions than your average bank.
I'm not saying this is right or good, and I'm curious about why there's been a big jump in closed accounts, as mentioned in the NYTimes article the writer is responding to.
posted by punchtothehead at 7:07 AM on November 8, 2023 [9 favorites]
What is optional is the point at which a SAR or multiple SARs becomes enough to close an account, and that's sometimes up to the bank, sometimes not. Doing business with someone who is committing fraud or money laundering could cost us a lot of money in fines and/or business, so banks accept a certain number of false positives rather than letting it happen. But the problems experienced here by the people whose accounts were closed - and I agree that the writer doesn't do a great job of connecting these pieces - is that there's nothing in any system that would indicate why the account was closed (if for a suspicious activity) and that the various systems that might contain a reason (if for non-suspicious activities) may be invisible to certain customer service tiers.
seanmpuckett Post Office Bank would still need to monitor for fraud, money laundering, and terrorism, especially given that more customers of such would deal in cash transactions than your average bank.
I'm not saying this is right or good, and I'm curious about why there's been a big jump in closed accounts, as mentioned in the NYTimes article the writer is responding to.
posted by punchtothehead at 7:07 AM on November 8, 2023 [9 favorites]
Here's the NYTimes article that the McKenzie's responding to (gift link)
posted by punchtothehead at 7:11 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by punchtothehead at 7:11 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
many such systems were never designed to talk to each other, can differ in age by decades, and all the decision makers have no idea what their systems even really do or how they operate
How strange is it that the actual practicality of a merger is the last thing to be considered, oftentimes after the sale has closed. The "decision" is purely financial -- can the sale happen and will it benefit shareholders? Software integration is just a minor detail, even though the companies are built almost entirely out of software.
It's like moving in to a house sight unseen, only to find out it was designed for people living 150 years ago. Your landlord and agent don't care because they made their money, but you are stuck trying to figure out where to plug in your toaster.
posted by swift at 7:19 AM on November 8, 2023 [14 favorites]
How strange is it that the actual practicality of a merger is the last thing to be considered, oftentimes after the sale has closed. The "decision" is purely financial -- can the sale happen and will it benefit shareholders? Software integration is just a minor detail, even though the companies are built almost entirely out of software.
It's like moving in to a house sight unseen, only to find out it was designed for people living 150 years ago. Your landlord and agent don't care because they made their money, but you are stuck trying to figure out where to plug in your toaster.
posted by swift at 7:19 AM on November 8, 2023 [14 favorites]
I admit I had read the mefi comments before reading the article, an the first thing I saw is:
> Patrick McKenzie
Oh. This guy.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:25 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
> Patrick McKenzie
Oh. This guy.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:25 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
Thanks punchtothehead! That NYT article was an excellent read, and the information abotu SARs is fascinating.
WRT to this FPP the NYC article answers some questions and raises several new ones. Like, I can now see that a "response" to the NYT article was necessary, since NYT didn't reference the extent of secrecy enforced by SAR regulations, in that not only are banks not allowed to tell customers about SARs but also banks aren't allowed to tell the US Government or even US courts about SARs. (What a weird crucial piece of info for the NYT article to leave out!) But now I am even more flummoxed as to what the other 90% of Patrick's article was supposed to be for. Knowing what it's responding to makes his article somehow LESS comprehensible except for the SARs bit.
posted by MiraK at 7:37 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
WRT to this FPP the NYC article answers some questions and raises several new ones. Like, I can now see that a "response" to the NYT article was necessary, since NYT didn't reference the extent of secrecy enforced by SAR regulations, in that not only are banks not allowed to tell customers about SARs but also banks aren't allowed to tell the US Government or even US courts about SARs. (What a weird crucial piece of info for the NYT article to leave out!) But now I am even more flummoxed as to what the other 90% of Patrick's article was supposed to be for. Knowing what it's responding to makes his article somehow LESS comprehensible except for the SARs bit.
posted by MiraK at 7:37 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
i'm gonna go read the article now, but i'm pretty happy regardless of whether or not it's good. if it's good, omg that is such a brilliant title i wish i had thought of it, if it's bad, omg that's such a brilliant title and since the article is bad that means i can steal it.
other titles i'm claiming dibs on:
other titles i'm claiming dibs on:
- "seeing like a search engine," which apparently no one has yet used as the title for an academic article? how could no one have used that title yet?
- "seeing like a
git", which would be on the subject of free/open source software development communities and the deep dysfunctions in same as replicated in slash enforced by the tools typically used in those communities
> I'm curious about why there's been a big jump in closed accounts, as mentioned in the NYTimes article the writer is responding to.
Dollars to donuts the big banks have started using AI tools to flag suspicious transactions and cut most of the humans out of the oversight loop.
posted by MiraK at 7:42 AM on November 8, 2023 [14 favorites]
Dollars to donuts the big banks have started using AI tools to flag suspicious transactions and cut most of the humans out of the oversight loop.
posted by MiraK at 7:42 AM on November 8, 2023 [14 favorites]
I'm pretty sure high school students with paper routes went extinct, like, thirty years ago.
The high school student jobs in my kids' immediate circle include: Restaurant delivery driver, Restaurant worker, Golf Course grounds helper, Ice Cream store staff (several), Climbing Gym staff / coach, Freelance Circus Performer / instructor, Jiujitsu instructor for little kids, after-school program helper.
So not quite a paper route, but a collection of odd mostly minimum wage (or close to it) jobs. Thankfully, minimum wage is $15 here so it adds up even for people who are only working 5-10 hours a week.
And they do have checking accounts with debit cards. The top uses of funds that I see from mine: Local Coffee shop walkable from school, CVS, Patreon, Steam / Riot game store, Etsy around the holidays and when they are buying presents for their friends.
posted by true at 7:47 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
The high school student jobs in my kids' immediate circle include: Restaurant delivery driver, Restaurant worker, Golf Course grounds helper, Ice Cream store staff (several), Climbing Gym staff / coach, Freelance Circus Performer / instructor, Jiujitsu instructor for little kids, after-school program helper.
So not quite a paper route, but a collection of odd mostly minimum wage (or close to it) jobs. Thankfully, minimum wage is $15 here so it adds up even for people who are only working 5-10 hours a week.
And they do have checking accounts with debit cards. The top uses of funds that I see from mine: Local Coffee shop walkable from school, CVS, Patreon, Steam / Riot game store, Etsy around the holidays and when they are buying presents for their friends.
posted by true at 7:47 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
so upon having read the article, my "wait what decade is this from anyway?" sticking point isn't the thing about paper routes, it's this:
anyway, i think the focus on technical systems here is off-base — use old software and more people and more training for those people and less technico-institutional contempt for the people doing the work and prioritize that guy over the people who sprechen sie professionalmiddleclass instead of the other way around. this is necessary because banking is a vital social service, and that's where most of its use value for most people resides, and so there needs to be a substantial number of people (yes, people, more people, so many people) who aer effectively there to do social work.
and yes this is all at right-angles to the profit motive, which is what i hoped the section about the needs of society and being good at being a bank would be about, but it's not, like not at all.
the post office banking suggestion is 100% right in every way and should not be pooh-poohed at all. say what you will about seeing like a state, a state has to have some variety of commitment toward providing use value for the people living in that state. and this is despite how many many many states are very bad at actually doing that thing they must do (and for more on that go read the good book the blah article's title references). and states lack the profit motive in quite the same way that corporations do, which is important even here in a world where the corporatization of the state has always loomed and has proceeded at quite the clip for the last 43 years.
more people, less efficiency, disregard for the profit motive. that's my solution for this problem and it'll be difficult to sway me from that position. of course here in this benighted world anyone actually doing that, at least here in the united states, is totally utopian and totally unachievable, but minimal steps toward that unachievable maximal program — i.e. stuff like post office banking — are still way valuable.
there's more i could say (inspired largely by my thoughts on the book that the title of this article riffs on and why the author of this article thinks it's appropriate to riff on that title), but that's a matter for my own blog rather than here. tl;dr, though: over time i'm increasingly realizing that i'm on the socialist side of the socialist/anarchist split, which makes me so sad because anarchists are cool people, because socialism spent the 20th century getting forcibly turned into actually existing socialism rather than anything resembling actual socialism, because anarchists are cool people (it's worth repeating this point), cool people who wear cool clothes and listen to cool music and punch people who need punching in very cool ways, and because socialists are total fuckin' dweebs.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:05 AM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
Google is also beloved by users because of overwhelming competence in shipping products that work almost all of the time.lololololol. lololol. lololololololol.
anyway, i think the focus on technical systems here is off-base — use old software and more people and more training for those people and less technico-institutional contempt for the people doing the work and prioritize that guy over the people who sprechen sie professionalmiddleclass instead of the other way around. this is necessary because banking is a vital social service, and that's where most of its use value for most people resides, and so there needs to be a substantial number of people (yes, people, more people, so many people) who aer effectively there to do social work.
and yes this is all at right-angles to the profit motive, which is what i hoped the section about the needs of society and being good at being a bank would be about, but it's not, like not at all.
the post office banking suggestion is 100% right in every way and should not be pooh-poohed at all. say what you will about seeing like a state, a state has to have some variety of commitment toward providing use value for the people living in that state. and this is despite how many many many states are very bad at actually doing that thing they must do (and for more on that go read the good book the blah article's title references). and states lack the profit motive in quite the same way that corporations do, which is important even here in a world where the corporatization of the state has always loomed and has proceeded at quite the clip for the last 43 years.
more people, less efficiency, disregard for the profit motive. that's my solution for this problem and it'll be difficult to sway me from that position. of course here in this benighted world anyone actually doing that, at least here in the united states, is totally utopian and totally unachievable, but minimal steps toward that unachievable maximal program — i.e. stuff like post office banking — are still way valuable.
there's more i could say (inspired largely by my thoughts on the book that the title of this article riffs on and why the author of this article thinks it's appropriate to riff on that title), but that's a matter for my own blog rather than here. tl;dr, though: over time i'm increasingly realizing that i'm on the socialist side of the socialist/anarchist split, which makes me so sad because anarchists are cool people, because socialism spent the 20th century getting forcibly turned into actually existing socialism rather than anything resembling actual socialism, because anarchists are cool people (it's worth repeating this point), cool people who wear cool clothes and listen to cool music and punch people who need punching in very cool ways, and because socialists are total fuckin' dweebs.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:05 AM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
if it's good, omg that is such a brilliant title i wish i had thought of it, if it's bad, omg that's such a brilliant title and since the article is bad that means i can steal it.
Feel free to steal the title, since he stole it from a book called Seeing Like a State.
Edit: it looks like you know this already
posted by swift at 8:07 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Feel free to steal the title, since he stole it from a book called Seeing Like a State.
Edit: it looks like you know this already
posted by swift at 8:07 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
yes, that's why it's a good title. everybody's out there riffing off of it all the time and this is a really good way to riff off of it.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:08 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:08 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
If you look through the comments on the nytimes article or this one there is story after story of people having their lives ruined by SAR regulations. It seems obvious that the enforced secrecy is just a bad law and should be changed.
posted by hermanubis at 8:10 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by hermanubis at 8:10 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
> competent telephone operations were instrumental to bringing equity ownership to the middle class.
Ah yes, the credit card oligopolies get to skim 2-3% off *every* transaction through interchange fees and their revenue has grown 10 fold in the last 20 years but giving real support to cardholders would bankrupt them.
posted by dis_integration at 8:12 AM on November 8, 2023 [20 favorites]
Ah yes, the credit card oligopolies get to skim 2-3% off *every* transaction through interchange fees and their revenue has grown 10 fold in the last 20 years but giving real support to cardholders would bankrupt them.
posted by dis_integration at 8:12 AM on November 8, 2023 [20 favorites]
No system will ever be able to answer all interesting questions about a user; that is formally undecidable in computer science.
what is the turing machine tape symbol for an eye roll?
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:29 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
what is the turing machine tape symbol for an eye roll?
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 8:29 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
finger pointing upward emoji to that. this appears to be a reference to some gödel shit and unless i'm mistaken (please tell me if i'm mistaken) the problem that this guy identifies has precisely nothing to do with some gödel shit. like pretty sure you're never going to encounter a formally undecidable bank customer. if you did, you're not obligated to be a bank that's complete and consistent so, like, if someone rolls up with the cretan paradox in small business form you are absolutely allowed to go tell them to bank with someone else.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:33 AM on November 8, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:33 AM on November 8, 2023 [12 favorites]
And lest you think this man's only sin is his insufferable supercilious smarter-than-thou ableism, let me note that these aforementioned six paragraphs also include rants about non-english speaking customers trying to do business with english speaking banks. He includes them in his list of annoying callers who are too unsophisticated to be tolerated by the likes of himself.
Interesting, I didn't take that away from his article at all. What I saw was a listing groups of people who need extra help. Patrick spent like 20 years living in Japan, working in the education and banking sectors, so it seems reasonable for him to mention this dimension among the many valid reasons Tier 1 support exists.
Were I his editor I would probably have cut the IQ bit some, if for no other reason that dude is verbose in general, and it doesn't help his point much. But I think the point stands that you don't want engineers that cost 500k a year spending time telling customers the same thing over and over again.
In general the article has three main points:
1. Banks have trapped themselves and their customers in support hell by outsourcing the software that contains their core business function.
2. Customer service is tiered, and the systems often don't integrate through that core, making call handoff rather poor.
3. SAR and related are the things society cared enough about to legislate and require from banks, and will also appear like corporate memory loss, by design.
posted by pwnguin at 8:51 AM on November 8, 2023 [9 favorites]
Interesting, I didn't take that away from his article at all. What I saw was a listing groups of people who need extra help. Patrick spent like 20 years living in Japan, working in the education and banking sectors, so it seems reasonable for him to mention this dimension among the many valid reasons Tier 1 support exists.
Were I his editor I would probably have cut the IQ bit some, if for no other reason that dude is verbose in general, and it doesn't help his point much. But I think the point stands that you don't want engineers that cost 500k a year spending time telling customers the same thing over and over again.
In general the article has three main points:
1. Banks have trapped themselves and their customers in support hell by outsourcing the software that contains their core business function.
2. Customer service is tiered, and the systems often don't integrate through that core, making call handoff rather poor.
3. SAR and related are the things society cared enough about to legislate and require from banks, and will also appear like corporate memory loss, by design.
posted by pwnguin at 8:51 AM on November 8, 2023 [9 favorites]
if someone rolls up with the cretan paradox in small business form you are absolutely allowed to go tell them to bank with someone else.
I would absolutely pay to watch this animated short, improvised comedy sketch, and/or HBO miniseries.
posted by BrashTech at 8:54 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
I would absolutely pay to watch this animated short, improvised comedy sketch, and/or HBO miniseries.
posted by BrashTech at 8:54 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Dollars to donuts the big banks have started using AI tools to flag suspicious transactions and cut most of the humans out of the oversight loop.
Almost certainly; you’d be very unsurprised by the number of fintech startups that are working in risk.
…having said that, I suspect there was also a noticeable spike due to crypto crackdowns. Spend any time digging through crypto chat/forum channels and you’ll find a fair number of people asking why their bank accounts were closed. Plenty of them openly admit to doing things that any bank would regard as spectacularly suspicious.
posted by aramaic at 8:59 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Almost certainly; you’d be very unsurprised by the number of fintech startups that are working in risk.
…having said that, I suspect there was also a noticeable spike due to crypto crackdowns. Spend any time digging through crypto chat/forum channels and you’ll find a fair number of people asking why their bank accounts were closed. Plenty of them openly admit to doing things that any bank would regard as spectacularly suspicious.
posted by aramaic at 8:59 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm pretty sure high school students with paper routes went extinct, like, thirty years ago.
Even longer - hell, in Studs Terkel's book Working the paper boy was just barely out of grade school, and that was back in 1974.
I've always envisioned, like, a ten-year-old kid on a bike as the "paper boy", not a high school student.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:02 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Even longer - hell, in Studs Terkel's book Working the paper boy was just barely out of grade school, and that was back in 1974.
I've always envisioned, like, a ten-year-old kid on a bike as the "paper boy", not a high school student.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:02 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
I read this guy's work, but I think of him as being sort of Matt Levine-adjacent, in that he's well-informed in a technical sense and intelligent, but accepts industry/capitalism priors uncritically (at least in his written work). Levine is a conscious apologist just for fun, this guy is so more implicitly.
let me note that these aforementioned six paragraphs also include rants about non-english speaking customers trying to do business with english speaking banks.
IIRC, he lived in Japan for an extended period without being perfectly fluent in Japanese, so he is speaking from having been in this position in another country. It is a technical problem! (Actually, it's two technical problems: dealing in a language you're not perfectly fluent in with a system that's different from the one you're used to.)
posted by praemunire at 9:14 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
let me note that these aforementioned six paragraphs also include rants about non-english speaking customers trying to do business with english speaking banks.
IIRC, he lived in Japan for an extended period without being perfectly fluent in Japanese, so he is speaking from having been in this position in another country. It is a technical problem! (Actually, it's two technical problems: dealing in a language you're not perfectly fluent in with a system that's different from the one you're used to.)
posted by praemunire at 9:14 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
I've always envisioned, like, a ten-year-old kid on a bike as the "paper boy", not a high school student.
I realize this is a total derail, but as a newspaper subscriber of many years, I've only ever seen adults in cars delivering my papers. Maybe retirees who are up at that hour anyway? I've never seen a kid on a bike. My guess is, as subscription rates drop, each delivery person must cover a wider area, hence car delivery.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:15 AM on November 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
I realize this is a total derail, but as a newspaper subscriber of many years, I've only ever seen adults in cars delivering my papers. Maybe retirees who are up at that hour anyway? I've never seen a kid on a bike. My guess is, as subscription rates drop, each delivery person must cover a wider area, hence car delivery.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:15 AM on November 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
I almost posted this guy’s piece on debt collection a little while ago. I like that one better. It takes a similar core approach as far as trying to explain something everybody hates in terms of incentives rather than human evil, but at the same time it has a clearer sense of moral condemnation of the outcome.
posted by atoxyl at 9:18 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by atoxyl at 9:18 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
I've always envisioned, like, a ten-year-old kid on a bike as the "paper boy", not a high school student.
You all are way off. Grown men in minivans, chunking papers out of car windows, are who delivers papers now. It's a job that worked its way up the 'age chain', like lawn care, because adults with adult needs are more responsible workers than kids on their summer vacation. Sure some kids still chuck papers just like some mow lawns. But not the majority.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:21 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
You all are way off. Grown men in minivans, chunking papers out of car windows, are who delivers papers now. It's a job that worked its way up the 'age chain', like lawn care, because adults with adult needs are more responsible workers than kids on their summer vacation. Sure some kids still chuck papers just like some mow lawns. But not the majority.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:21 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
“ Dollars to donuts the big banks have started using AI tools to flag suspicious transactions and cut most of the humans out of the oversight loop.”
This is why my husband, a landscaper, routinely gets all his money apps frozen and funds held for 20+ days, despite having opened a business account and filed all the required licenses and certificates, getting caught by AIs looking for notionally illegal transactions, and customer service agents can’t even see the rationale that caused his account to get frozen.
posted by toodleydoodley at 9:22 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
This is why my husband, a landscaper, routinely gets all his money apps frozen and funds held for 20+ days, despite having opened a business account and filed all the required licenses and certificates, getting caught by AIs looking for notionally illegal transactions, and customer service agents can’t even see the rationale that caused his account to get frozen.
posted by toodleydoodley at 9:22 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
Dollars to donuts the big banks have started using AI tools
You don't need LLMs to do this. The first cut, at least, has been done algorithmically for a few years now at the big banks.
posted by praemunire at 9:22 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
You don't need LLMs to do this. The first cut, at least, has been done algorithmically for a few years now at the big banks.
posted by praemunire at 9:22 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
this guy’s piece on debt collection
It also touches on a similar theme of “you, presumed highly literate professional reader, cannot imagine how much difficulty some people have navigating interactions with financial institutions” but again it’s made clearer that he finds the extent to which the system exploits people’s educational, cognitive, and free time disadvantages upsetting.
(It also references Seeing Like a State lol)
posted by atoxyl at 9:33 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
It also touches on a similar theme of “you, presumed highly literate professional reader, cannot imagine how much difficulty some people have navigating interactions with financial institutions” but again it’s made clearer that he finds the extent to which the system exploits people’s educational, cognitive, and free time disadvantages upsetting.
(It also references Seeing Like a State lol)
posted by atoxyl at 9:33 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
Dollars to donuts the big banks have started using AI tools to flag suspicious transactions and cut most of the humans out of the oversight loop.
If by “have started” you mean their Risk department started using machine learning to help flag suspicious transactions back during the GWB Administration then sure.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:38 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
If by “have started” you mean their Risk department started using machine learning to help flag suspicious transactions back during the GWB Administration then sure.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:38 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
Is there any actual evidence that an excess number of people are having their accounts cancelled due to SAR or suggested fraudulent activities? SARs and their equivalent have been around for a while.
Per some stats I've seen, the number of people moving from unbanked to banked is increasing, so there probably are some marginal cases at the end of that tail, in terms of income. The people who are banked, but underbanked [have a checking account, but get loans via a title loan or payday lender] - it's a bit harder to find stats for that group, but I think it is growing.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:41 AM on November 8, 2023
Per some stats I've seen, the number of people moving from unbanked to banked is increasing, so there probably are some marginal cases at the end of that tail, in terms of income. The people who are banked, but underbanked [have a checking account, but get loans via a title loan or payday lender] - it's a bit harder to find stats for that group, but I think it is growing.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:41 AM on November 8, 2023
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, you gotta call the bank when they steal your money by charging you fees they aren't entitled to charge. Maybe if they quit doing that, they'd get less calls from us rubes who often only have a couple hundred bucks in our checking account. Had, I mean, until they charged us overdraft fees they weren't entitled to collect by policy or law, so now we're calling them to get our shit back.
Given that it happens enough to be a clear pattern, I'd say it qualifies as criminal conversion, but I'm just an unsophisticated rube who didn't even graduate high school.
posted by wierdo at 9:43 AM on November 8, 2023 [13 favorites]
Given that it happens enough to be a clear pattern, I'd say it qualifies as criminal conversion, but I'm just an unsophisticated rube who didn't even graduate high school.
posted by wierdo at 9:43 AM on November 8, 2023 [13 favorites]
Is there any actual evidence that an excess number of people are having their accounts cancelled due to SAR or suggested fraudulent activities?
The nature of SAR laws is that if anybody knows the answer to this, they are not allowed to talk about it.
posted by swift at 9:46 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]
The nature of SAR laws is that if anybody knows the answer to this, they are not allowed to talk about it.
posted by swift at 9:46 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]
banks aren't allowed to tell the US Government or even US courts about SARs. (What a weird crucial piece of info for the NYT article to leave out!)
This is not quite right. FinCEN is part of the U.S. government (subunit of Treasury). Law enforcement can query the database. But even if you are a very well-resourced private litigant with a good reason to see the SARs of a financial institution you're suing and an expansive protective order already in place in the litigation to prevent broader disclosure--you can't. There are not many categories of non-classified documents of which this is true.
posted by praemunire at 9:48 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
This is not quite right. FinCEN is part of the U.S. government (subunit of Treasury). Law enforcement can query the database. But even if you are a very well-resourced private litigant with a good reason to see the SARs of a financial institution you're suing and an expansive protective order already in place in the litigation to prevent broader disclosure--you can't. There are not many categories of non-classified documents of which this is true.
posted by praemunire at 9:48 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
> Patrick spent like 20 years living in Japan, working in the education and banking sectors, so it seems reasonable for him to mention this dimension
> he lived in Japan for an extended period without being perfectly fluent in Japanese, so he is speaking from having been in this position in another country. It is a technical problem!
That one sentence about non-english speakers trying to bank with english-speaking institutions is embedded in six paragraphs of ranting about how aggravating and unreasonable customers are to him (and to Tier 1 reps). If he was really trying to make a point about language barriers as a technical problem for customers, I don't think it's too much to ask that he should... say so? He frequently uses personal experience to make points in this article, so why didn't he mention Japan and his personal struggles with language barriers in banking, if that was really his point?
I suppose if you all know him well enough to surmise his true meaning from what he left unsaid, I'll defer to your opinion, but without the benefit of your extra information, interpreting what he wrote here as racist and ableist seems reasonable to me. I guess he's just not a good writer.
> But I think the point stands that you don't want engineers that cost 500k a year spending time telling customers the same thing over and over again
You say this like someone's been asking them to. It's a straw man.
> If by “have started” you mean their Risk department started using machine learning to help flag suspicious transactions back during the GWB Administration then sure.
Oh no, not at all, I am aware AI tools aren't a new phenomenon in banking an finance. But I have something of an insider's view into how the use of AI tools has changed in both government and commercial use over the last three years because I work in the industry and I'm seeing it happening.
It's not just that the number and variety of cognitive engines has skyrocketed (and here I don't speak only of generative AI or LLMs but rather all cognitive engines in general, even the non-glamorous ones that are used by accountants and fisheries rather than in "sexy" use cases like self-driving cars or Chat GPT) - anyway, it's not just that cognitive engines are going through something of a cambrian explosion right now, but also that humans are being cut out of the loop much more drastically than before due to a general perception that AI engines are reliable. Over the past two years my employer has sold our AI tools to many government agencies which have then proceeded to cut oversight staff - like, just two or three people remain in a department that used to have dozens. And crucially, 2-3 people aren't actually enough. Even according to our own customer service teams, we recommend more "humans in the loop" than many of these agencies set aside budget for. Everyone thinks AI is a silver bullet these days. Budget allocations for necessary human oversight have gone way down since news about LLMs has spread.
posted by MiraK at 9:52 AM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
> he lived in Japan for an extended period without being perfectly fluent in Japanese, so he is speaking from having been in this position in another country. It is a technical problem!
That one sentence about non-english speakers trying to bank with english-speaking institutions is embedded in six paragraphs of ranting about how aggravating and unreasonable customers are to him (and to Tier 1 reps). If he was really trying to make a point about language barriers as a technical problem for customers, I don't think it's too much to ask that he should... say so? He frequently uses personal experience to make points in this article, so why didn't he mention Japan and his personal struggles with language barriers in banking, if that was really his point?
I suppose if you all know him well enough to surmise his true meaning from what he left unsaid, I'll defer to your opinion, but without the benefit of your extra information, interpreting what he wrote here as racist and ableist seems reasonable to me. I guess he's just not a good writer.
> But I think the point stands that you don't want engineers that cost 500k a year spending time telling customers the same thing over and over again
You say this like someone's been asking them to. It's a straw man.
> If by “have started” you mean their Risk department started using machine learning to help flag suspicious transactions back during the GWB Administration then sure.
Oh no, not at all, I am aware AI tools aren't a new phenomenon in banking an finance. But I have something of an insider's view into how the use of AI tools has changed in both government and commercial use over the last three years because I work in the industry and I'm seeing it happening.
It's not just that the number and variety of cognitive engines has skyrocketed (and here I don't speak only of generative AI or LLMs but rather all cognitive engines in general, even the non-glamorous ones that are used by accountants and fisheries rather than in "sexy" use cases like self-driving cars or Chat GPT) - anyway, it's not just that cognitive engines are going through something of a cambrian explosion right now, but also that humans are being cut out of the loop much more drastically than before due to a general perception that AI engines are reliable. Over the past two years my employer has sold our AI tools to many government agencies which have then proceeded to cut oversight staff - like, just two or three people remain in a department that used to have dozens. And crucially, 2-3 people aren't actually enough. Even according to our own customer service teams, we recommend more "humans in the loop" than many of these agencies set aside budget for. Everyone thinks AI is a silver bullet these days. Budget allocations for necessary human oversight have gone way down since news about LLMs has spread.
posted by MiraK at 9:52 AM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
I've been thinking for a few years that the rise in consumer credit since the 70s is, (along, I suppose, with increased ease of manufacturing plastics), about the biggest cause of mass extinction and environmental destruction of the planet earth. The amount of fucking garbage we produce is unfathomable. Every time I go to the thrift store, there is a line of people bringing trunk-fulls of consumer products, the majority of which the thrift store throws straight into the dumpster. Credit means we have the ability to buy almost infinite objects, and then turn around and toss them in the garbage can. Likewise cars, gas, airline flights, and other major contributors to climate destruction. To say nothing of the fees and the rentier nature of the industry. Hot take: credit is bad.
posted by latkes at 9:54 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by latkes at 9:54 AM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
if you all know him well enough to surmise his true meaning from what he left unsaid, I'll defer to your opinion
I don't know him personally at all (only remember the Japan thing because he wrote about money transmission via conbini, and I think conbini are cool), and take no position on whether he's racist personally. But here he's talking about reasons people have substantial challenges interacting successfully (from their POV) with bank support:
Now I myself would not have embedded this paragraph between two paragraphs about customers who are "extremely unsophisticated about the bank account, finance in general, and frequently many other things in life," because they're clearly not the same thing (scammers, for example, are presumptively not unsophisticated) and for reasons of equity one should be more careful to avoid any possibility of being read to equate not having English as a first language with being "extremely unsophisticated." But I don't think that's what the article actually says.
(And, man, I wish I could say the "extremely unsophisticated" customer doesn't exist, but I've listened to/read enough CSR communications [through a critical lens, mind you--trying to figure out what the CSR or their institution were doing wrong!] to know that they really, really do. In a broader sense, sure, you can adopt Tressie McMillan Cottom's position that intelligence is just a question of match between proficiency and cultural environment, and I largely do, but...people are trying to get services from their banks in one of those cultural environments.)
posted by praemunire at 10:20 AM on November 8, 2023 [14 favorites]
I don't know him personally at all (only remember the Japan thing because he wrote about money transmission via conbini, and I think conbini are cool), and take no position on whether he's racist personally. But here he's talking about reasons people have substantial challenges interacting successfully (from their POV) with bank support:
It is extremely important to understand that those [substantial] challenges exist and that they will dominate your frequent fliers for support. Some people have only emerging competence in English but will want services from a bank which does business in English. Some people, frequently with large account balances and long successful histories with you, are experiencing age-related decline in their faculties and need to be protected, frequently without that being a capital-F Fact within the system yet. Some people are crooks. Some people have a very interesting relationship with the truth, and say many things to banks which probably felt true to them in the moment.These people all do have additional challenges in interacting successfully with bank support. You can be a nuclear physicist or a Nobel Prize-winning novelist but if you were raised in Tibet speaking Tibetan as your first language and only started learning English a few years ago when you fled the country as an adult, you're going to have to negotiate some additional challenges in dealing with U.S. bank customer support. In fact, in my opinion, banks should be required to be cognizant of these challenges in a way that they are not (yet!) Both out-and-out scammers and scam-by-bad-customer-service organizations like banks frequently take advantage of a customer's lack of English proficiency to exploit them.
Now I myself would not have embedded this paragraph between two paragraphs about customers who are "extremely unsophisticated about the bank account, finance in general, and frequently many other things in life," because they're clearly not the same thing (scammers, for example, are presumptively not unsophisticated) and for reasons of equity one should be more careful to avoid any possibility of being read to equate not having English as a first language with being "extremely unsophisticated." But I don't think that's what the article actually says.
(And, man, I wish I could say the "extremely unsophisticated" customer doesn't exist, but I've listened to/read enough CSR communications [through a critical lens, mind you--trying to figure out what the CSR or their institution were doing wrong!] to know that they really, really do. In a broader sense, sure, you can adopt Tressie McMillan Cottom's position that intelligence is just a question of match between proficiency and cultural environment, and I largely do, but...people are trying to get services from their banks in one of those cultural environments.)
posted by praemunire at 10:20 AM on November 8, 2023 [14 favorites]
Moving money around between people and organizations shouldn't be a profit centre. It's an essential service in a modern economy. The current pay-to-pay system is stupid and broken and benefits no one but bankers. So, I don't love to hear bankers whine about how their customers are costing them money by making them do their jobs in not the absolutely smoothest possible way. Fuck 'em.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:21 AM on November 8, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:21 AM on November 8, 2023 [10 favorites]
equity ownership to the middle class Weighing in to say that IME he's right about this (along with Bogle's ideas) being a huge boon-- for lots of people I know about in the eighties, and for me later, the ability to do this has led to a manyfold increase in savings decades later compared to other bank alternatives.
Also, post offices the world over are shrinking, I think postal banking with them
posted by lwxxyyzz at 10:25 AM on November 8, 2023
Also, post offices the world over are shrinking, I think postal banking with them
posted by lwxxyyzz at 10:25 AM on November 8, 2023
MiraK, banks do use AI for fraud detection; credit card companies, too. Recent Executive Order re: AI.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:46 AM on November 8, 2023
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:46 AM on November 8, 2023
i mean "postal banking" isn't a demand for specifically post offices to offer banking, it's phrased that way because specifically post offices in some places (and previously more places) offered banking services. really in a demand for"postal banking," "postal banking" is used as shorthand for "hey, banking is the sort of thing that the state should manage, not the market, and this used to happen through post offices i guess?"
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:55 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:55 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
swift: "How strange is it that the actual practicality of a merger is the last thing to be considered, oftentimes after the sale has closed. The "decision" is purely financial -- can the sale happen and will it benefit shareholders? Software integration is just a minor detail, even though the companies are built almost entirely out of software."
...and the solution presented for this in the FPP is "more mergers so that every bank is Chase Bank"
Didn't we already use that joke in Demolition Man?
posted by caution live frogs at 11:15 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
...and the solution presented for this in the FPP is "more mergers so that every bank is Chase Bank"
Didn't we already use that joke in Demolition Man?
posted by caution live frogs at 11:15 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
proposal: instead of banks, use three seashells.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:30 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:30 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]
This is why my husband, a landscaper, routinely gets all his money apps frozen and funds held for 20+ days, despite having opened a business account and filed all the required licenses and certificates, getting caught by AIs looking for notionally illegal transactions, and customer service agents can’t even see the rationale that caused his account to get frozen.
This. Like this seems insanely quaint to say, but three to four decades or so ago retail banking was overseen by a local branch manager and staff who knew their customers - the types of business they were in, what their financial patterns were, what their stage of life was. They had the kind of information needed to identify which suspicious transactions were, in fact, normal ones.
Banks chose to become gigantic, and instead of actually expanding their knowledge base alongside it - they cut it back by centralizing services and, eventually, automating lots of what was once done by people. Like banks have infinitely more data on banking customers than they ever did, but that doesn't translate into the kind of knowledge that they would have had in 1990 when a branch manager would have known your husband is a landscaper and their money comes and goes in spurts.
The banks made the decision to not know who their customers were anymore, and in the process opened new doors to suspicious and illegal financial transactions because they don't know who anyone is anymore, and now bitch and moan that they are hamstrung by regulations put in place because of the problems they created - all while increasing their profits every single year.
Like 80-90% of the population needs exceptionally basic banking services - all the complexity, and subsequent regulation and bureaucracy, are there to generate immense wealth for the elite - and if you happen to be an average person caught in the cross-fire, too bad so sad. It's why the Post Office banking solution makes oodles of sense - because if all you need are basic financial functions to deposit money, pay for things and borrow a little when you buy something large - you don't actually need an industry this byzantine. The rest of the system is there for rich people to be able to do rich people shit that most people don't need.
posted by openhearted at 11:34 AM on November 8, 2023 [26 favorites]
This. Like this seems insanely quaint to say, but three to four decades or so ago retail banking was overseen by a local branch manager and staff who knew their customers - the types of business they were in, what their financial patterns were, what their stage of life was. They had the kind of information needed to identify which suspicious transactions were, in fact, normal ones.
Banks chose to become gigantic, and instead of actually expanding their knowledge base alongside it - they cut it back by centralizing services and, eventually, automating lots of what was once done by people. Like banks have infinitely more data on banking customers than they ever did, but that doesn't translate into the kind of knowledge that they would have had in 1990 when a branch manager would have known your husband is a landscaper and their money comes and goes in spurts.
The banks made the decision to not know who their customers were anymore, and in the process opened new doors to suspicious and illegal financial transactions because they don't know who anyone is anymore, and now bitch and moan that they are hamstrung by regulations put in place because of the problems they created - all while increasing their profits every single year.
Like 80-90% of the population needs exceptionally basic banking services - all the complexity, and subsequent regulation and bureaucracy, are there to generate immense wealth for the elite - and if you happen to be an average person caught in the cross-fire, too bad so sad. It's why the Post Office banking solution makes oodles of sense - because if all you need are basic financial functions to deposit money, pay for things and borrow a little when you buy something large - you don't actually need an industry this byzantine. The rest of the system is there for rich people to be able to do rich people shit that most people don't need.
posted by openhearted at 11:34 AM on November 8, 2023 [26 favorites]
In a vacuum banks and a solid, functional banking system should be something a society yearns for. However in our reality here in the US, the capitalists have shockingly ruined it for everyone who isn't them in their insatiable thirst for money. Disclaimer: I worked in banking so I feel like I have a tiny idea about how things are being changed for the worse, but it was during the Clinton administration, I could be way off base.
It's like people don't read history books. This constant monetization of every activity of day to day life is simply not sustainable. Neither is the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
At least I have a firmer idea about how I'd use the three seashells for banking.
posted by Sphinx at 11:44 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
It's like people don't read history books. This constant monetization of every activity of day to day life is simply not sustainable. Neither is the growing disparity between the rich and the poor.
At least I have a firmer idea about how I'd use the three seashells for banking.
posted by Sphinx at 11:44 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
It's like people don't read history books.
I think it has been firmly established that it's not just LIKE people don't read history books, this is more like "this is one more piece of evidence THAT people don't read history books".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:56 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think it has been firmly established that it's not just LIKE people don't read history books, this is more like "this is one more piece of evidence THAT people don't read history books".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:56 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
> Banks chose to become gigantic, and instead of actually expanding their knowledge base alongside it - they cut it back by centralizing services and, eventually, automating lots of what was once done by people. Like banks have infinitely more data on banking customers than they ever did, but that doesn't translate into the kind of knowledge that they would have had in 1990 when a branch manager would have known your husband is a landscaper and their money comes and goes in spurts.
so this is the first thing i've seen in either the thread or the original post that's reminiscent of seeing like a state. that book (which is excellent, you should all read it) is about how the top-down rationalizing strategies used by states since the french revolution tend to not yield the efficiency improvements that their backers think they will, but instead serve the function of making the things that have been "rationalized" easier for large central organizations to understand.
so like during the french revolution, the revolutionaries took an extraordinarily convoluted system of laws wherein each locality and each person in that locality and each arcane interaction by specific people within specific localities had special cases upon special cases upon special cases such that no one attempting to administer france centrally could ever hope of untangling any of it without the help of locals to guide them through it, and replaced it with laws that were straightforwardly uniform. and like on the one hand, yay, some of those rationalizing actions resulted in the reduction of private privileges for the nobility, but on the other hand boo a ton of the decisions the reformers made were primarily made for the purpose of making the whole nation visible to those reformers, and by wiping out all the hard-to-understand special cases they also wiped out a lot of the things that made those bespoke systems more efficient than top-down one-size-fits-all systems.
another one of the big examples in seeing like a state was "rationalized" tree farming practices initially introduced in the 19th century. these involved replacing messy natural forests that had a bunch of different species all intermingled and replacing them with monocultures spaced out just so. this made recordkeeping about how much lumber was available much, much easier, and made getting at that lumber much, much easier — but also resulted in "forests" that did okay for about 20 to 30 years and then everything started dying because that complex ecosystem was there for a reason you idiots.
the top-down digitized automated one-size-fits-all strategies for managing a big centralized bank that everyone's using these days straight up murder efficiencies like the one you talk about above.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:12 PM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
so this is the first thing i've seen in either the thread or the original post that's reminiscent of seeing like a state. that book (which is excellent, you should all read it) is about how the top-down rationalizing strategies used by states since the french revolution tend to not yield the efficiency improvements that their backers think they will, but instead serve the function of making the things that have been "rationalized" easier for large central organizations to understand.
so like during the french revolution, the revolutionaries took an extraordinarily convoluted system of laws wherein each locality and each person in that locality and each arcane interaction by specific people within specific localities had special cases upon special cases upon special cases such that no one attempting to administer france centrally could ever hope of untangling any of it without the help of locals to guide them through it, and replaced it with laws that were straightforwardly uniform. and like on the one hand, yay, some of those rationalizing actions resulted in the reduction of private privileges for the nobility, but on the other hand boo a ton of the decisions the reformers made were primarily made for the purpose of making the whole nation visible to those reformers, and by wiping out all the hard-to-understand special cases they also wiped out a lot of the things that made those bespoke systems more efficient than top-down one-size-fits-all systems.
another one of the big examples in seeing like a state was "rationalized" tree farming practices initially introduced in the 19th century. these involved replacing messy natural forests that had a bunch of different species all intermingled and replacing them with monocultures spaced out just so. this made recordkeeping about how much lumber was available much, much easier, and made getting at that lumber much, much easier — but also resulted in "forests" that did okay for about 20 to 30 years and then everything started dying because that complex ecosystem was there for a reason you idiots.
the top-down digitized automated one-size-fits-all strategies for managing a big centralized bank that everyone's using these days straight up murder efficiencies like the one you talk about above.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:12 PM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]
> These people all do have additional challenges in interacting successfully with bank support.
I'm not disputing that at all. Banking by its very nature serves everyone in society and that includes many people who will have huge challenges using these services.
I'm just saying, this guy's point seems to be that these people are extremely aggravating to beleaguered banks and customer service reps. Why did I think that was his point? Because that is what he has written.
He didn't write six paragraphs about how many people face challenges to accessing and properly understanding bank services, buttressed by personal anecdotes about how he himself faced such challenges in Japan. Instead he wrote six paragraphs about how aggravating and dumb and insufferable are the people who have challenges accessing and properly understanding bank services, buttressed by personal anecdotes about how he himself had to deal with so many stupid people when he was a customer service rep.
I think since you are familiar with his other writing (? right?), you're able to take a more circumspect view of what he actually meant. Since I lack that extra context, I'm judging his article more harshly. But I mean it - I do take your word for it that he possibly was trying to make the point you say he was!
posted by MiraK at 12:22 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
I'm not disputing that at all. Banking by its very nature serves everyone in society and that includes many people who will have huge challenges using these services.
I'm just saying, this guy's point seems to be that these people are extremely aggravating to beleaguered banks and customer service reps. Why did I think that was his point? Because that is what he has written.
He didn't write six paragraphs about how many people face challenges to accessing and properly understanding bank services, buttressed by personal anecdotes about how he himself faced such challenges in Japan. Instead he wrote six paragraphs about how aggravating and dumb and insufferable are the people who have challenges accessing and properly understanding bank services, buttressed by personal anecdotes about how he himself had to deal with so many stupid people when he was a customer service rep.
I think since you are familiar with his other writing (? right?), you're able to take a more circumspect view of what he actually meant. Since I lack that extra context, I'm judging his article more harshly. But I mean it - I do take your word for it that he possibly was trying to make the point you say he was!
posted by MiraK at 12:22 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
> At least I have a firmer idea about how I'd use the three seashells for banking.
please forgive me, this isn't my standard type of joke but i'm having a real hard time not making it. okay, here we go:
yeah it's important that the ideas are firm, otherwise it gets kinda messy
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:31 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
please forgive me, this isn't my standard type of joke but i'm having a real hard time not making it. okay, here we go:
yeah it's important that the ideas are firm, otherwise it gets kinda messy
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:31 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Patrick McKenzie is absolutely fixated on the fact that US bureaucracies reward people who (like him) present as members of the professional-managerial class. It’s part of all of his essays and many of his tweets.
My impression, which could be wrong but is definitely furthered by what he says here about enabling access to credit and equity, is that he sees this on some level as a necessary evil, a least-worst hierarchy.
His perspective is usually interesting but his blind spots can be glaring. For instance, when he wrote about the collapse of First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank, he identifies that the banks’ business models were giving sweetheart loan deals to yuppies in the belief they would in turn bring decades of big deposits as they grew old and rich. But it feels like his bias in favor of systems serving the educated class keeps him from seeing that this was ultimately a bad bet, because these customers’ very sophistication, comfort with the banking system, and ready access to financial news and online banking during the work day meant they pulled their uninsured funds at the first sign of trouble.
Here, with the example of the consumers who “don’t understand” why they overdrew their accounts, I think he’s missing that these customers are also playing a quite rational part, guessing that this is the best tactic to get a refund. And there are reasons the banking system has better channels to get tech guys low interest loans than to get poor people overdraft fee waivers or landscapers access to their funds, and it’s not just to weed out customers with time consuming arithmetic questions or even, necessarily, to maximize shareholder value. It’s also absolutely about appealing to the bank bosses’ ideas about what a valued customer looks like.
posted by smelendez at 12:32 PM on November 8, 2023 [19 favorites]
My impression, which could be wrong but is definitely furthered by what he says here about enabling access to credit and equity, is that he sees this on some level as a necessary evil, a least-worst hierarchy.
His perspective is usually interesting but his blind spots can be glaring. For instance, when he wrote about the collapse of First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank, he identifies that the banks’ business models were giving sweetheart loan deals to yuppies in the belief they would in turn bring decades of big deposits as they grew old and rich. But it feels like his bias in favor of systems serving the educated class keeps him from seeing that this was ultimately a bad bet, because these customers’ very sophistication, comfort with the banking system, and ready access to financial news and online banking during the work day meant they pulled their uninsured funds at the first sign of trouble.
Here, with the example of the consumers who “don’t understand” why they overdrew their accounts, I think he’s missing that these customers are also playing a quite rational part, guessing that this is the best tactic to get a refund. And there are reasons the banking system has better channels to get tech guys low interest loans than to get poor people overdraft fee waivers or landscapers access to their funds, and it’s not just to weed out customers with time consuming arithmetic questions or even, necessarily, to maximize shareholder value. It’s also absolutely about appealing to the bank bosses’ ideas about what a valued customer looks like.
posted by smelendez at 12:32 PM on November 8, 2023 [19 favorites]
Here, with the example of the consumers who “don’t understand” why they overdrew their accounts, I think he’s missing that these customers are also playing a quite rational part, guessing that this is the best tactic to get a refund.
I mean the hidden piece here is why it's allowed at all for banks to charge 35$ to someone who overdrew their account by 7$. I know math pretty well and I still don't understand why you as a bank would choose to charge someone an overdraft fee in those circumstances.
posted by corb at 12:35 PM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
I mean the hidden piece here is why it's allowed at all for banks to charge 35$ to someone who overdrew their account by 7$. I know math pretty well and I still don't understand why you as a bank would choose to charge someone an overdraft fee in those circumstances.
posted by corb at 12:35 PM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]
so like during the french revolution, the revolutionaries took an extraordinarily convoluted system of laws wherein each locality and each person in that locality and each arcane interaction by specific people within specific localities had special cases upon special cases upon special cases such that no one attempting to administer france centrally could ever hope of untangling any of it without the help of locals to guide them through it, and replaced it with laws that were straightforwardly uniform.
So, this is helpful. Because, so much of this article is unspeakably obvious and condescending - yes, banks have core software driving them, and yes, they have ticketing systems and tiered support, and oh my god yes we all live in the 21st century and literally all of us know this. But there's a deeper issue at play.
Which has to do with the less-than-public clearinghouses that sometimes we have to deal with that are opaque and often are completely baffling, and literally nobody is going to help with on the phone.
For example, my car insurance rates with GEICO skyrocketed. I hadn't filed a claim in years and years. I shopped around for insurance with other providers who would invariably quote me lower rates, and then, getting close to an actual new policy, would start to ask me about a claim that was filed recently. But there was no claim filed recently.
Calling the call centers resulted in a delicate dance of obfuscation and non-information that nevertheless pointed me towards the (unknown-to-me) LexisNexis CLUE report. I went through the motions, ordered a copy, and, yes, found some bizarre claim, filed by GEICO, my own insurance, in my name. It had nothing to do with me, my car, other people in my family or their cars, my address or any former address, but there it was on my report. Just total garbage nonsense hidden behind a report I would never have known about. Like, you hear about checking your credit report, but when did you hear about checking your LexisNexis CLUE report?
So, I got it resolved by filing an issue with LexisNexis, where they apparently went back to GEICO and figured out that someone or something had made a terrible mistake. Literally nobody on the phone was any help, they were clearly instructed not to talk to me about it. I needed to re-up with GEICO temporarily at a higher rate because it took months to resolve this. I just received a letter stating, paraphrased, "oops." But once it was resolved, I was able to shop for insurance at lower rates again, and you can be sure I am no longer a GEICO customer.
I also have a redress number with the TSA that, without some sort of investigation, was keeping me from flying without bizarre discussions at the check-in desk and various phone calls. Why? Who knows. There was some other sort of total garbage nonsense that had nothing to do with me whatsoever. It all was completely opaque to me, and remains a mystery to this day. Similarly, I received a letter stating that matters had simply been resolved.
Neither of these issues had (AFAIK) anything to do with fraud. None of this had to do with anything I had done, nor a misunderstanding the systems at hand, or having even any sort of mild infractions or issues associated with me. Nobody would help on the phone, or discuss the issues with me in any reasonable way. It all had nothing to do with tiered support or economies of scale. It was all just obfuscation surrounding some bizarre mistakes large organizations were making. It can happen to you, out of nowhere, for no reason, and you can't rely on merely talking reasonably to someone on the phone to fix it.
There needs to be some sort of recourse a normal person can have after being caught up in total nonsense garbage.
posted by eschatfische at 12:48 PM on November 8, 2023 [38 favorites]
So, this is helpful. Because, so much of this article is unspeakably obvious and condescending - yes, banks have core software driving them, and yes, they have ticketing systems and tiered support, and oh my god yes we all live in the 21st century and literally all of us know this. But there's a deeper issue at play.
Which has to do with the less-than-public clearinghouses that sometimes we have to deal with that are opaque and often are completely baffling, and literally nobody is going to help with on the phone.
For example, my car insurance rates with GEICO skyrocketed. I hadn't filed a claim in years and years. I shopped around for insurance with other providers who would invariably quote me lower rates, and then, getting close to an actual new policy, would start to ask me about a claim that was filed recently. But there was no claim filed recently.
Calling the call centers resulted in a delicate dance of obfuscation and non-information that nevertheless pointed me towards the (unknown-to-me) LexisNexis CLUE report. I went through the motions, ordered a copy, and, yes, found some bizarre claim, filed by GEICO, my own insurance, in my name. It had nothing to do with me, my car, other people in my family or their cars, my address or any former address, but there it was on my report. Just total garbage nonsense hidden behind a report I would never have known about. Like, you hear about checking your credit report, but when did you hear about checking your LexisNexis CLUE report?
So, I got it resolved by filing an issue with LexisNexis, where they apparently went back to GEICO and figured out that someone or something had made a terrible mistake. Literally nobody on the phone was any help, they were clearly instructed not to talk to me about it. I needed to re-up with GEICO temporarily at a higher rate because it took months to resolve this. I just received a letter stating, paraphrased, "oops." But once it was resolved, I was able to shop for insurance at lower rates again, and you can be sure I am no longer a GEICO customer.
I also have a redress number with the TSA that, without some sort of investigation, was keeping me from flying without bizarre discussions at the check-in desk and various phone calls. Why? Who knows. There was some other sort of total garbage nonsense that had nothing to do with me whatsoever. It all was completely opaque to me, and remains a mystery to this day. Similarly, I received a letter stating that matters had simply been resolved.
Neither of these issues had (AFAIK) anything to do with fraud. None of this had to do with anything I had done, nor a misunderstanding the systems at hand, or having even any sort of mild infractions or issues associated with me. Nobody would help on the phone, or discuss the issues with me in any reasonable way. It all had nothing to do with tiered support or economies of scale. It was all just obfuscation surrounding some bizarre mistakes large organizations were making. It can happen to you, out of nowhere, for no reason, and you can't rely on merely talking reasonably to someone on the phone to fix it.
There needs to be some sort of recourse a normal person can have after being caught up in total nonsense garbage.
posted by eschatfische at 12:48 PM on November 8, 2023 [38 favorites]
> I know math pretty well and I still don't understand why you as a bank would choose to charge someone an overdraft fee in those circumstances.
it's almost as if it's the banks who are playing dumb and being bad at math, affecting that they (effete simpering voice) ~alas~ realized only too late that $45 + $32 equals more than $70, oh no, this transaction should never have gone through and (villain voice) now they must charge you a penalty for their mathematical ineptitude.
posted by MiraK at 12:49 PM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
it's almost as if it's the banks who are playing dumb and being bad at math, affecting that they (effete simpering voice) ~alas~ realized only too late that $45 + $32 equals more than $70, oh no, this transaction should never have gone through and (villain voice) now they must charge you a penalty for their mathematical ineptitude.
posted by MiraK at 12:49 PM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
On one hand, I don't think that he's necessarily espousing a personal solution - he's just describing how things actually work. It's fine to say that no one should ever discriminate on the basis of anything at all but realistically that's exactly what many many institutions do. And his article is intended to describe what banks currently do from the customer service side - not describe what customers do (since that's covered by the NYT article he is responding to).
Secondly - mom and pop local banks do great until you end up on the bad side of them and they just refuse to do business with you because they don't like your accent or the way you dress or which church you go to. From personal experience the downsides are rather painful.
posted by goddess_eris at 1:39 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Secondly - mom and pop local banks do great until you end up on the bad side of them and they just refuse to do business with you because they don't like your accent or the way you dress or which church you go to. From personal experience the downsides are rather painful.
posted by goddess_eris at 1:39 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
it's almost as if it's the banks who are playing dumb and being bad at math, affecting that they (effete simpering voice) ~alas~ realized only too late that $45 + $32 equals more than $70, oh no, this transaction should never have gone through and (villain voice) now they must charge you a penalty for their mathematical ineptitude.
It's actually the law now that you have to opt in to overdraft protection for one time debit card transactions. If you aren't opted in, it's on the bank to decline the transaction. Regardless of whether they do or not, they aren't supposed to charge a fee. Not that it necessarily matters in practice, as I'm pretty sure I recounted on this here website some months ago and constituted the basis of my most recent series of calls to my bank.
posted by wierdo at 1:48 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
It's actually the law now that you have to opt in to overdraft protection for one time debit card transactions. If you aren't opted in, it's on the bank to decline the transaction. Regardless of whether they do or not, they aren't supposed to charge a fee. Not that it necessarily matters in practice, as I'm pretty sure I recounted on this here website some months ago and constituted the basis of my most recent series of calls to my bank.
posted by wierdo at 1:48 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Branches may have de-skilled, but they are making a quiet come back in bank customer service, as an important front in the battle against fraud. I run a fair-size business and we are having to send people to the branches regularly to deal with large transactions, foreign transactions, and a bunch of other things, in a way that we certainly did not have to do a few years ago.
posted by MattD at 2:57 PM on November 8, 2023
posted by MattD at 2:57 PM on November 8, 2023
This. Like this seems insanely quaint to say, but three to four decades or so ago retail banking was overseen by a local branch manager and staff who knew their customers ...Banks chose to become gigantic
For a long time, branch banking was illegal. This is partly why half the failed S&Ls during the 80s crisis were situated in Texas -- none of them could diversify away from their local markets and when the oil market dried up so did the mortgage payments in Texas...
So I guess once Riegle-Neal allowed it nationally, it's a choice, but a fairly predictable one.
posted by pwnguin at 3:23 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
For a long time, branch banking was illegal. This is partly why half the failed S&Ls during the 80s crisis were situated in Texas -- none of them could diversify away from their local markets and when the oil market dried up so did the mortgage payments in Texas...
So I guess once Riegle-Neal allowed it nationally, it's a choice, but a fairly predictable one.
posted by pwnguin at 3:23 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]
Metafilter: Why am I here? What am I reading? Why am I wasting my life reading this asshole's thoughts on *anything*?
posted by some loser at 3:42 PM on November 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by some loser at 3:42 PM on November 8, 2023 [7 favorites]
Regardless of whether they do or not, they aren't supposed to charge a fee.
Most large banks have dropped NSF fees and are cutting back on overdraft fees. (The CFPB is literally your tax dollars at work, folks--I invite you to contemplate the differences in attitudes between various prominent figures towards the CFPB and ask yourself how much of a difference it makes to ordinary people just scraping by who's in power.)
posted by praemunire at 3:53 PM on November 8, 2023 [12 favorites]
Most large banks have dropped NSF fees and are cutting back on overdraft fees. (The CFPB is literally your tax dollars at work, folks--I invite you to contemplate the differences in attitudes between various prominent figures towards the CFPB and ask yourself how much of a difference it makes to ordinary people just scraping by who's in power.)
posted by praemunire at 3:53 PM on November 8, 2023 [12 favorites]
There needs to be some sort of recourse a normal person can have after being caught up in total nonsense garbage.
Not to excuse what happened to you at all, but, for future reference, the recourse here is to go to your state insurance commissioner/AG (depending on state). While they won't be your formal advocate, they are often quite good at sorting out this kind of moronicity.
Of course, you have to have learned somewhere that this is an option first...
posted by praemunire at 3:58 PM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]
Not to excuse what happened to you at all, but, for future reference, the recourse here is to go to your state insurance commissioner/AG (depending on state). While they won't be your formal advocate, they are often quite good at sorting out this kind of moronicity.
Of course, you have to have learned somewhere that this is an option first...
posted by praemunire at 3:58 PM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]
Weighing in to say that IME he's right about this (along with Bogle's ideas) being a huge boon-- for lots of people I know about in the eighties, and for me later, the ability to do this has led to a manyfold increase in savings decades later compared to other bank alternatives.
Not compared to a pension, though. In most cases, anyway.
posted by praemunire at 4:01 PM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
Not compared to a pension, though. In most cases, anyway.
posted by praemunire at 4:01 PM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]
“ There needs to be some sort of recourse a normal person can have after being caught up in total nonsense garbage.
Not to excuse what happened to you at all, but, for future reference, the recourse here is to go to your state insurance commissioner/AG (depending on state). While they won't be your formal advocate, they are often quite good at sorting out this kind of moronicity.”
I agree this is the *correct* course of action, and I did fax my congressperson a bunch of research about the internet to get att to unfuck my local dsl cabinet, but that was in the early 2000s before tea party reactionaries took over our entire legislative and regulatory system. We were early adopters in Florida and we were already really “conservative”. I’m trying to imagine getting Florida’s regulatory agencies to function now that our entire slate of Grover Norquist clones has been at it for the last, well, since Lawton Chiles died.
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:35 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
Not to excuse what happened to you at all, but, for future reference, the recourse here is to go to your state insurance commissioner/AG (depending on state). While they won't be your formal advocate, they are often quite good at sorting out this kind of moronicity.”
I agree this is the *correct* course of action, and I did fax my congressperson a bunch of research about the internet to get att to unfuck my local dsl cabinet, but that was in the early 2000s before tea party reactionaries took over our entire legislative and regulatory system. We were early adopters in Florida and we were already really “conservative”. I’m trying to imagine getting Florida’s regulatory agencies to function now that our entire slate of Grover Norquist clones has been at it for the last, well, since Lawton Chiles died.
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:35 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
My brother works for one of the chartered Canadian banks, and he frequently works on the bank's discount brokerage and customer support matters. He says that in the past few years, especially during the pandemic, the bank is progressively reducing the amount of resources and staffing devoted to customer support and self-directed investing. The bank's numbers apparently show that it makes little to no money from depositors and investors with less than about two million in net assets. The bank made the business decision to cut its budget for providing customer support to small depositors and investors. I suppose that is fair under the current rules of business. It's just a shame that the current rules of business don't also require the banks to announce "Hey your poors and mere millionaires, we're cutting your access to your accounts and increasing your banking fees so that we may better service other people. Don't like that? You can go to another bank, where they are doing the same thing". Time for a rules amendment.
posted by SnowRottie at 5:53 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by SnowRottie at 5:53 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
OMG THERE IS SO MUCH GOLD IN THESE COMMENTS I love this place, I've flagged multiple comments as fantastic
posted by JHarris at 6:30 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 6:30 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
I’m on the board of a tiny non-profit and am the main person in the US managing our finances. The NYT article was very triggering for me because, due to a handful of ill-timed decisions that only looked bad in hindsight, I found myself on the losing end of a wise.com account suspension with $30k in accounts payable to overseas contractors and $80k in inbound grant funding frozen. To make it worse, I had registered our non-profit account under my personal email (an objectively bad decision) so that when they banned the non-profit I was personally banned too. This had all kinds of negative downstream consequences- I routinely send funds to support my child attending college outside the country and by leaving Wise all of a sudden my long-time credit union is flagging me for sending large wire transfers.
It took about 6 weeks of sleepless nights to get the grant funds refunded back to the granting agency and then a few weeks of dealing with their bureaucracy to send the funds to a different account. Since we receive grants in big chunks every six months and pay our contractors roughly quarterly, I’m extremely paranoid we’ll get flagged by our regular bank on the next big overseas transaction. There seems to be literally no recourse for correcting false positive reports, and the chances these will domino while you try to do benign things seems high.
posted by simra at 7:32 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
It took about 6 weeks of sleepless nights to get the grant funds refunded back to the granting agency and then a few weeks of dealing with their bureaucracy to send the funds to a different account. Since we receive grants in big chunks every six months and pay our contractors roughly quarterly, I’m extremely paranoid we’ll get flagged by our regular bank on the next big overseas transaction. There seems to be literally no recourse for correcting false positive reports, and the chances these will domino while you try to do benign things seems high.
posted by simra at 7:32 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
I would absolutely pay to watch this animated short, improvised comedy sketch, and/or HBO miniseries.
"Listen, it's impossible to have overdrawn my account. First, I'd have to spend half the balance, then half of that again. Half of any non-zero value is still non-zero, so even if I did this in perpetuity, an infinite number of withdrawals wouldn't go negative!"
posted by pwnguin at 9:01 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
"Listen, it's impossible to have overdrawn my account. First, I'd have to spend half the balance, then half of that again. Half of any non-zero value is still non-zero, so even if I did this in perpetuity, an infinite number of withdrawals wouldn't go negative!"
posted by pwnguin at 9:01 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]
Securing the future monetary system
also btw...
-Why bitcoin ATMs are taking over malls and gas stations across the U.S.
-US consumer watchdog proposes rules for Big Tech payments, digital wallets
-Swiss National Bank to pilot wholesale digital currency with UBS, other banks
-FedNow's legal terms contain a game changer for digital wallets and payment apps
posted by kliuless at 11:47 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
The financial system is on the cusp of significant change. The digital revolution that has affected so many aspects of our lives is increasingly being felt in the financial realm. Households and firms rightly expect financial services to deliver the ease and digital functionality that they experience in so many other aspects of their lives. Central banks know that they have a responsibility not only to keep pace with the digital age, but to lead innovation to ensure that it serves the public good.ECB starts preparation for digital euro in multi-year project - "The digital euro will be for most intents and purposes like any online wallet or bank account except it will be free to use and guaranteed by the ECB rather than a private company, making it safer... The ECB says a digital euro will create competition in the market for payments, dominated by U.S. credit card companies."
Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are central to this effort. Whether in wholesale form – as a type of digital central bank reserve – or retail form – as a digital banknote – it is increasingly clear, at least to me, that these new forms of money will sit at the core of the future financial system. To fulfil this role, CBDCs will need to meet several requirements, such as a user-friendly and versatile technical design and a robust legal framework. Above all, they must be secure – and be seen to be so.
also btw...
-Why bitcoin ATMs are taking over malls and gas stations across the U.S.
-US consumer watchdog proposes rules for Big Tech payments, digital wallets
-Swiss National Bank to pilot wholesale digital currency with UBS, other banks
-FedNow's legal terms contain a game changer for digital wallets and payment apps
posted by kliuless at 11:47 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]
Most large banks have dropped NSF fees and are cutting back on overdraft fees. (The CFPB is literally your tax dollars at work, folks--I invite you to contemplate the differences in attitudes between various prominent figures towards the CFPB and ask yourself how much of a difference it makes to ordinary people just scraping by who's in power.)
My bank is literally on that (first) list and continues to charge overdraft fees for authorizations that never turn into a real transaction. I haven't actually had any returned ACH transactions in the past several years, so it's possible they aren't still charging for that.
My previous bank is on the list of those who haven't eliminated fees, but charge much less and make it hard to actually incur the fee.
posted by wierdo at 3:50 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
My bank is literally on that (first) list and continues to charge overdraft fees for authorizations that never turn into a real transaction. I haven't actually had any returned ACH transactions in the past several years, so it's possible they aren't still charging for that.
My previous bank is on the list of those who haven't eliminated fees, but charge much less and make it hard to actually incur the fee.
posted by wierdo at 3:50 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
> "Listen, it's impossible to have overdrawn my account. First, I'd have to spend half the balance, then half of that again. Half of any non-zero value is still non-zero, so even if I did this in perpetuity, an infinite number of withdrawals wouldn't go negative!"
do you want parmenidean monism because that sort of thing is what gets you parmenidean monism
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:15 AM on November 9, 2023
do you want parmenidean monism because that sort of thing is what gets you parmenidean monism
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:15 AM on November 9, 2023
On reading tfa and this thread, I sincerely wonder why more ppl don’t keep their money in their mattresses. But of course, they do. It’s just that for most people, mattresses are analogous to cars, rims, clothing, accessories, vacations, drugs and alcohol, and all the little and big things, quiet and conspicuous, that you do to maintain status or enjoy the moment, when you know that, not only can you not take it with you, you can’t even keep it till next month. Depending on your situation, you know you’re going to lose your money to banking fees, health care copays, household emergencies, rent hikes, or civil forfeiture (or bail/lawyers), so spend it NOW on something worthwhile.
posted by toodleydoodley at 7:19 AM on November 9, 2023
posted by toodleydoodley at 7:19 AM on November 9, 2023
Not compared to a pension, though. In most cases, anyway.
People are being a bit 'the past was better', so I've got to come and add some language to some exaggerations.
First, pensions had really long vesting periods for partial pensions, and full pensions even longer. If you didn't vest, you got nothing. That's why so many people worked at the same place for so long. They were forced to. So the maximum number of people actually receiving a pension peaked around 35million in 1980, and the amount received was pretty low, with very low COL adjustments, less than $500 a month. Could pensions be improved? Yes, but there are real reasons why 401ks came into place and not that many people cheered their demise at the time. Also, basically the same things that would fix pensions would fix 401ks, so it's an either/or kind of thing. Also many [regular, not rich] people who are currently receiving large pensions now are doing so because they forwent (is that a word?) raises in lieu of larger future pension disbursements. You have to have a lot of trust to make that choice.
Secondly, RE: banking overdraft fees. In ye olden days, since much was paid for by check and real time clearing less common, overdraft fees were less common, because checks were rejected and sent back to the issuer. Which often got your picture listed on wall as banned from writing checks, a high returned check fee, and if you did it more than a few times, a visit from the cops. So whether $35 bucks is high has to be compared to what the other scenario was. So again, there are real reasons why overdraft fees were considered kinder.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on November 9, 2023
People are being a bit 'the past was better', so I've got to come and add some language to some exaggerations.
First, pensions had really long vesting periods for partial pensions, and full pensions even longer. If you didn't vest, you got nothing. That's why so many people worked at the same place for so long. They were forced to. So the maximum number of people actually receiving a pension peaked around 35million in 1980, and the amount received was pretty low, with very low COL adjustments, less than $500 a month. Could pensions be improved? Yes, but there are real reasons why 401ks came into place and not that many people cheered their demise at the time. Also, basically the same things that would fix pensions would fix 401ks, so it's an either/or kind of thing. Also many [regular, not rich] people who are currently receiving large pensions now are doing so because they forwent (is that a word?) raises in lieu of larger future pension disbursements. You have to have a lot of trust to make that choice.
Secondly, RE: banking overdraft fees. In ye olden days, since much was paid for by check and real time clearing less common, overdraft fees were less common, because checks were rejected and sent back to the issuer. Which often got your picture listed on wall as banned from writing checks, a high returned check fee, and if you did it more than a few times, a visit from the cops. So whether $35 bucks is high has to be compared to what the other scenario was. So again, there are real reasons why overdraft fees were considered kinder.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:32 AM on November 9, 2023
Also, basically the same things that would fix pensions would fix 401ks, so it's an either/or kind of thing.
I disagree. People need guaranteed money in old age, more than they get from Social Security. I'm not sure what you think would "fix" a 401(k), but you can't get there from here.
So again, there are real reasons why overdraft fees were considered kinder.
When you're using the words "bank" and "kinder" in the same sentence, you have departed from the way. The banks did not give a damn about whether your picture was posted on the wall at the bodega; they wanted to maximize revenue while minimizing effort.
posted by praemunire at 8:01 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
I disagree. People need guaranteed money in old age, more than they get from Social Security. I'm not sure what you think would "fix" a 401(k), but you can't get there from here.
So again, there are real reasons why overdraft fees were considered kinder.
When you're using the words "bank" and "kinder" in the same sentence, you have departed from the way. The banks did not give a damn about whether your picture was posted on the wall at the bodega; they wanted to maximize revenue while minimizing effort.
posted by praemunire at 8:01 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Not compared to a pension, though. In most cases, anyway.
Only with very long-term employment. Lots of pensions plans, at least from states and by reputation from unions, approach being downright predatory on people serving less than 20 years or so.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:34 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Only with very long-term employment. Lots of pensions plans, at least from states and by reputation from unions, approach being downright predatory on people serving less than 20 years or so.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 8:34 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
basically the same things that would fix pensions would fix 401ks, so it's an either/or kind of thing
401Ks are better for people who stay less than 20 years; pensions are better for people who stay more. The problem is of course that 1) it's hard to predict when you start a job, which you're going to want, and 2) that with the increase in social and business comfort on firings, you could want to stay 20 years, and still wind up out on your ass at 19. My father was fired at 19 years two decades ago - they gave him a severance, which lasted him a year, but still didn't provide for his old age in the way that he would have needed; he is still working until this day.
401Ks are subject to the vagaries of the stock market; but then, pension funds require the company to continue to be profitable for the next several decades. We live in a time where a lot more businesses start up and then fail; this is not exactly conducive to security.
posted by corb at 9:47 AM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
401Ks are better for people who stay less than 20 years; pensions are better for people who stay more. The problem is of course that 1) it's hard to predict when you start a job, which you're going to want, and 2) that with the increase in social and business comfort on firings, you could want to stay 20 years, and still wind up out on your ass at 19. My father was fired at 19 years two decades ago - they gave him a severance, which lasted him a year, but still didn't provide for his old age in the way that he would have needed; he is still working until this day.
401Ks are subject to the vagaries of the stock market; but then, pension funds require the company to continue to be profitable for the next several decades. We live in a time where a lot more businesses start up and then fail; this is not exactly conducive to security.
posted by corb at 9:47 AM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]
- So the maximum number of people actually receiving a pension peaked around 35million in 1980
-- Lots of pensions plans, at least from states and by reputation from unions, approach being downright predatory on people serving less than 20 years
Reagan kneecapped labor unions in 1981, when he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Union pension vestment varies; for example, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO (NY/northern NJ) vests after three years, UFCW Local 663 (Minneapolis retail, meat packing and processing, food preparation and manufacturing workers) vests after five years, & IBEW 595 (Electrical workers in Alameda, San Joaquin, and Calaveras Counties, CA) offers "immediate 100% vesting" of all contributions to pension account.
For state employee pensions: One of the ways that states responded to the Great Recession and Financial Crisis of 2007-09 was to look for ways to save money on retirement benefits. A common way that states have done this is to increase the number of years that public employees have to work to qualify for a pension. Public Pension Vesting Periods, by State, as of Nov. 2022 lists Wyoming, 4 years; Idaho, five years; Alabama, 10 years, and Arizona, "12.2" years. Most plans require 5-10 years. Indiana is the sole state requiring 20 years.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:07 AM on November 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
-- Lots of pensions plans, at least from states and by reputation from unions, approach being downright predatory on people serving less than 20 years
Reagan kneecapped labor unions in 1981, when he fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers. Union pension vestment varies; for example, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO (NY/northern NJ) vests after three years, UFCW Local 663 (Minneapolis retail, meat packing and processing, food preparation and manufacturing workers) vests after five years, & IBEW 595 (Electrical workers in Alameda, San Joaquin, and Calaveras Counties, CA) offers "immediate 100% vesting" of all contributions to pension account.
For state employee pensions: One of the ways that states responded to the Great Recession and Financial Crisis of 2007-09 was to look for ways to save money on retirement benefits. A common way that states have done this is to increase the number of years that public employees have to work to qualify for a pension. Public Pension Vesting Periods, by State, as of Nov. 2022 lists Wyoming, 4 years; Idaho, five years; Alabama, 10 years, and Arizona, "12.2" years. Most plans require 5-10 years. Indiana is the sole state requiring 20 years.
posted by Iris Gambol at 10:07 AM on November 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
Only with very long-term employment. Lots of pensions plans, at least from states and by reputation from unions, approach being downright predatory on people serving less than 20 years or so.
Andecdote masquerading as data: SEIU's union with the state of Oregon has a pension with a 5 year vesting period. I got laid off at 4.5y. Fortunately they round up but that's like 80k lit on fire if you leave at 4.4y. Changing jobs by year 4 is incredibly common among my generation, especially in dual income families.
Other pain points:
Andecdote masquerading as data: SEIU's union with the state of Oregon has a pension with a 5 year vesting period. I got laid off at 4.5y. Fortunately they round up but that's like 80k lit on fire if you leave at 4.4y. Changing jobs by year 4 is incredibly common among my generation, especially in dual income families.
Other pain points:
- The retirement system is tiered, and every generation gets screwed over a bit more to keep defined benefit ratio for the old guard. Since I've left they added a fourth tier of reduced benefits
- The money is constantly at risk to legal attack. Every few years a constitutional challenge is brought, it seems.
- The pension in no way makes up for the low wage compared to industry. I had to make a counter offer to get them to go above rate schedule, because the contract only counts years of experience with the union. And I still make ~10x more now doing the same work in industry.
It was all just obfuscation surrounding some bizarre mistakes large organizations were making. It can happen to you, out of nowhere, for no reason, and you can't rely on merely talking reasonably to someone on the phone to fix it.
posted byTuttle Buttle at 8:12 AM on November 9
posted by neuron at 8:31 AM on November 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by
posted by neuron at 8:31 AM on November 10, 2023 [6 favorites]
I actually really enjoyed this article. It actually mirrors my experience a lot as a volunteer on certain community help forums relating to Google (I guess, I didn't work a job as L1 support...I did it for free.) So I'd actually take a line that was already quoted in another comment, but add the immediately prior line from the article.
What will often happen in these tech companies is a recognition that volunteers with product information who are willing to work for free is a valuable asset, and so there will be an effort made to build programs that incentivize and encourage these volunteers to participate. There will be a system of recognition and tiers, and benefits accordingly. For Google, it is the Product Experts program, but I noticed when I had an issue with a Dell computer I had purchased that some users had a signature indicating they were part of the Dell Community Rockstars Program (and definitely not a Dell employee) and I knew that we were basically kin, but just for different companies.
Anyway, whether they are called Product Experts or Rockstars or whatever else, it kinda fits in with the L1, 2, 3, whatever structure, with more fun steps, such as:
1. we are volunteers who may be under NDA, but that doesn't mean we necessarily get information shared or not shared with us.
2. we may or may not have access to company team members, and may or may not know things about the products that they don't know. We may or may not have the ability to escalate to either other outsourced people or to the company engineers themselves.
3. There may be product decisions that help or hinder the ability for anyone (even volunteers) to provide support
I won't go too far into that, just to say that I see something related to Google's legendarily hostile customer support attitude as relating to what bombastic lowercase pronouncements may have found so lol-worthy about the assertion that Google ships products that work almost all the time...and that is this: Google ALSO infamously has basically the exactly same "secret determinations" that can have people's accounts suspended or terminated with little ability to appeal or little information provided about it. Everything in this article is *absolutely* just as true of Google so it looks extremely strange for those lines to be thrown in as an example of how things are different. Furthermore, a lot of the criticisms when Google products and services *do* fail are because customer support is rare or nonexistent. (That being said, even what the article describes about there often being side channels to get support and bypass the ordinary bureaucracy is true in certain Google situations...it just usually involves the court of public opinion and a viral thread on Twitter/X.)
I thought there was an FPP here on the blue about this case, but now I'm not finding it, but here was a NY Times article about a man's whose Google account was terminated for photos he was sharing with his doctor -- that Google's automated systems interpreted as CSAM: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
posted by subversiveasset at 3:20 PM on November 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
Google is, for example, a legendarily hostile organization to attempt to get customer support from. Google is also beloved by users because of overwhelming competence in shipping products that work almost all of the time.What Google and many other tech companies have done is that instead of developing this structure of L1, L2, L3 support (whether in-house, outsourced, or some combination), they have done something even more ""fun"": the community help forum. The community help forum basically only gets posts and replies from other users.
What will often happen in these tech companies is a recognition that volunteers with product information who are willing to work for free is a valuable asset, and so there will be an effort made to build programs that incentivize and encourage these volunteers to participate. There will be a system of recognition and tiers, and benefits accordingly. For Google, it is the Product Experts program, but I noticed when I had an issue with a Dell computer I had purchased that some users had a signature indicating they were part of the Dell Community Rockstars Program (and definitely not a Dell employee) and I knew that we were basically kin, but just for different companies.
Anyway, whether they are called Product Experts or Rockstars or whatever else, it kinda fits in with the L1, 2, 3, whatever structure, with more fun steps, such as:
1. we are volunteers who may be under NDA, but that doesn't mean we necessarily get information shared or not shared with us.
2. we may or may not have access to company team members, and may or may not know things about the products that they don't know. We may or may not have the ability to escalate to either other outsourced people or to the company engineers themselves.
3. There may be product decisions that help or hinder the ability for anyone (even volunteers) to provide support
I won't go too far into that, just to say that I see something related to Google's legendarily hostile customer support attitude as relating to what bombastic lowercase pronouncements may have found so lol-worthy about the assertion that Google ships products that work almost all the time...and that is this: Google ALSO infamously has basically the exactly same "secret determinations" that can have people's accounts suspended or terminated with little ability to appeal or little information provided about it. Everything in this article is *absolutely* just as true of Google so it looks extremely strange for those lines to be thrown in as an example of how things are different. Furthermore, a lot of the criticisms when Google products and services *do* fail are because customer support is rare or nonexistent. (That being said, even what the article describes about there often being side channels to get support and bypass the ordinary bureaucracy is true in certain Google situations...it just usually involves the court of public opinion and a viral thread on Twitter/X.)
I thought there was an FPP here on the blue about this case, but now I'm not finding it, but here was a NY Times article about a man's whose Google account was terminated for photos he was sharing with his doctor -- that Google's automated systems interpreted as CSAM: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
Ms. Hessick, the law professor, said the cooperation the technology companies provide to law enforcement to address and root out child sexual abuse is “incredibly important,” but she thought it should allow for corrections.As a volunteer, all I can say is -- yeah, don't use Google Photos or Google Drive as a fun scrapbook for your kids' photos, because I have seen too many instances of folks losing complete access to everything because what they thought of an innocent bathtime photo triggered a system. But that's cold comfort after a user has lost access to their account. And there's usually no explicit confirmation or warning of that. It's all just speculation, speculation, and then maybe correlation with similar other cases (and this depends on information that people think about sharing...most times, people aren't thinking about their activity because they didn't know that it crossed some line. There was a whole thing where YouTube started saying that doxxing would be considered harassment, including if someone doxxed themselves, even if the video was unlisted or private. But during the pandemic, some music programs required students to show their ID card before their performance....)
“From Google’s perspective, it’s easier to just deny these people the use of their services,” she speculated. Otherwise, the company would have to resolve more difficult questions about “what’s appropriate behavior with kids and then what’s appropriate to photograph or not.”
posted by subversiveasset at 3:20 PM on November 12, 2023 [1 favorite]
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posted by swift at 5:30 AM on November 8, 2023 [35 favorites]