And what is a dumb bank?

After talking about an intelligent bank yesterday, I found a huge challenge with a dumb bank today.

It started because I just got a charge for a renewal of a subscription that I didn’t know I had. The charge was made from my AMEX card via PayPal, so I launched questions with both. PayPal was only via chatbots but, with AMEX, I have a telephone number that I called and, after searching, found a number for PayPal too. Why am I calling financial firms in 2025? It should be automated.

The thing is that I had received this renewal for a service I don’t remember signing up to and having to got through sign-ons to PayPal and AMEX to try and resolve it. Then you get the usual we are heavily overloaded with calls right now, so we might answer you in ten minutes or more. That is followed by people saying the transaction is a subscription and you need to contact the provider. Then you find that the provider no longer exists, has no contact info and a website that is as dead as a Dodo.

Brilliant.

So, I call AMEX to complain and they tell me that the transaction is still to be processed. Call back in three days or more. Is this 2025? I call PayPal, and their queues are also overloaded, so I ask for a callback. Twenty minutes later, I get a callback and it hangs up. Great. This is the 21st century customer experience, and it is awful. Constant call queuing, zero online access for resolutions, zero customer journey experience and zero empathy. You then get the financial firm who offer you access via a call centre, but go around in circles waiting for a Customer Service Agent, after you have been through lengthy sign-in processes on their call centres and then, just as you think you’re going to get a CSA … they hang up on you.

21st century life built for the 19th century.

What is the answer?

Well, you would expect by now that the user could just talk to their phone in a conversation with an AI CSA that was intelligent enough to know the answers. It is coming, but today’s customer experience feels like we have gone back in time. Things are more complicated and not simplified, yet the whole march of digitalisation and technological progress was meant to simplify everything. We have a long way to go.

My vision for the future is where we live in a world like the film Her (if you haven’t seen it, it’s a must watch) where I have a relationship with an AI friend who can manage everything for me. I don’t do admin. I delegate it all to my AI agent.

We are very close to a world where this will come true but, in the meantime, we have PayPal, AMEX and others demanding that we call their dumb call centres who cannot give any answers and payments taken without approval using subscription services that we never signed up to.

#justsaying