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Did I ever mention that I am unimpressed by the Chinese banking system? This week I heard a sorry tale which goes a long way to highlighting the utter incompetence of the system.
A friend works for a local organisation which employs over 500 people. Said organisation is looking to expand and so borrows over ¥50 million from a bank. So far, so good. The lending bank is not the bank the organisation has banked with for the last 50 years and the new bank make it a condition of the loan that all banking business must be exclusively theirs. So the organisation closes its old bank account, transfers its loot to the new bank and carries on. No problem.
About once a month, the employees of the organisation quite like to receive their salaries. Salaries are paid directly into their bank accounts. Oops! They all have accounts with the original bank. Chinese banks cannot do inter-bank transfers. (Often they have difficulty transferring to other branches of their own bank!)
So, to receive their salaries, all 500+ employees must open new accounts in the new bank. Fortunately, the organisation will take care of this. Unfortunately, the local branch of the new bank only has three employees and opening 500+ new accounts, issuing ATM cards etc will take about two months.
So, the organisation regrets that salaries will not be paid this month because the bank can't handle it.
What gets me is that, in the UK, the various banks are highly competitive independent businesses, but I can still transfer dosh from my account to anyone else's account with no problems. China's banks are all majority state owned but they can't transfer between each other! As I've mentioned before, to pay my electricity, I have to withdraw cash from my bank, walk across the road to the electricity company's bank and pay the cash back in again. Water is a yet another different bank, as is my mortgage.
I'm often told that the Chinese invented money. Pity they didn't invent an efficient way to handle it.
So true! They all have their jobs, and that is good enough. There is no
incentive to actually make their services competitive. I was actually told
I needed the receiver of a bank-to-bank transfer to sign the transfer when
sending! Um...what is the point of the transfer?
I was asked to sign two names - sender (me) and recipient. When I ponted
out that asking someone to sign a name which is clearly not their own is
probably criminal, the bank staff looked at me as if I was some kind of
moron.