In the past most Europeans regarded their bank with the same affection that turkeys reserve for Christmas. But banks are being forced to change. New technology is allowing them to expand the services they offer and hence the way their customers use them.
The retail banks which line the central streets of all European cities are mostly housed in dull, forbidding buildings put up at the turn of the century to impress passers-by with the bank’s solidity and to protect the money inside, not to make customers feel welcome. In all the member states of the European Community, there was in effect a cartel of local banks, which all charged their customers the same high (and often unexplained) fees for looking after their money. The governments of member states regulated most things their banks did, in particular by setting the minimum interest rate at which they could lend money, and the most they could pay depositors. The managements of these banks tended to be introverted and intent on preserving the mystique that somehow banking was different from any other business, rather than on selling services. That was what European banks used to be like. Walk off the street into a bank in London or Bilbao today and as likely as not the massive changes that are taking place in European banking will hit you in the face. Instead of dour cashiers sitting behind high counters and bulletproof glass, a modern bank branch is likely to be open-plan, brightly lit and plastered with advertisements for all the products that banks now try so hard to sell. These products range far beyond conventional bank accounts to credit cards, insurance and even holidays.
Banks have been forced to change by several forces. First, and most powerful, has been deregulation. The introduction of the single European market at the beginning of this year means that a bank legally established in one member state of the European Union can now open branches and sell services in any other member state. That means French banks can offer Germans mortgages to buy a house; British banks are competing for Spanish savings; and an Italian bank can lend money to a Greek who wants to buy a car. The result of these changes is that European banking has become far more competitive, offering customers more choice and forcing banks to work harder.
The second force behind the rapid change in how European banks operate is technology. Until recently, retail banks’ main task was to shuffle bits of paper around. Most payments used to begin with the customer writing a cheque asking his bank to pay someone else however much money was written on the cheque. The recipient of the cheque would send it to his bank, which in turn would send it to the bank of the person who wrote the cheque. Once the latter bank had confirmed that the person who wrote the cheque had enough money in his account to cover the cheque, then that bank would send another piece of paper to the recipient’s bank transferring the money. The amount of paperwork this system of clearing cheques generated was horrendous and kept the majority of people employed by banks busy.
Modern telecommunications equipment and computers are rapidly making all of this paper-shuffling redundant. In the process, this new technology is allowing banks to expand the number of services they offer and hence the way their customers use them.
On the surface, at least, these changes are least obvious when it comes to the most basic thing most Europeans use a bank for – to have a current account. At its most basic, this is an account into which someone’s salary is paid, a convenient place to keep money safely and a means of paying bills (by writing a cheque).
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