I was about to write a strong letter to
my bank because of an unreasonable charge on my statement. I was
wrong. The bank hadn't charged me, Intuit had. The problem was
quickly corrected by my bank and Intuit gained another hostile former
customer.
What I realized was that my dream and my nightmare had come true. Nearly forty years ago when I was a bank vice president and was inventing most of the bank services we have today, I tested my own version of bill payment (manually). I found that once a test client was hooked on the service they couldn't give it up.
The nightmare: the amount of trouble
setting up the bill payment accounts and the automatic deposits to
the account were so great that it was nearly impossible to close the
account. Test clients were very angry when the test was not made into
a real service by my bank management.
The dream: for me as a banker the new
service made it nearly impossible for a customer to leave the bank.
The bank could grow at nearly 30% per year if everyone was on bill
pay and automatic deposit. Thirty percent per year was the average
turnover in accounts in those days. Virtually no one would have left.
The bank today that has my automatic deposit, auto-payment and bill pay services has really “got me.” I calculate it would take close to twenty hours (scattered over several months) to change all the deposits, auto-payments and bill-payments.