THE GREAT BANK STORIES TAHI AND RUA

Funny isn't it what comes out of the wood work when time are tough.

Some of us at the prawn know a few people who don't have to worry about the price differentials of blocks of cheddar. They are the sort of people who have worked hard, had faith in themselves and their ideas and done well. Capitalists some call them, others would say just ordinary people doing good stuff. Today over a good lunch I heard two bloody good banking stories.These are true stories -no shit.

Story Tahi.

A couple who have done well - and who employ a few people and for whatever reason, they have about $250k to invest. Dark clouds form on the investment horizon so they decide that it maybe a good idea to invest said $250k in Kiwibank.

They rang Kiwi bank, talked to them about investing the money and yip Kiwibank were interested in seeing the colour of their money. So they say "can we set up an account to put the $250k in?" - Yip Kiwibank said, no probs.
Ok my mate said, can we transfer the money from bank B to Kiwibank? , No probs Kiwibank said. So can we do an interbank transfer - ah no said Kiwi bank we need cash or a bank check.
Oh, said my mates what is the closest branch ?

Paddy's Lotto shop in Courtnay Place they said.

So with a check for $250k my good mate trundled down to
Paddy's lotto shop wandered past the barbers it houses and duly, manually deposited $250k - bit third world we thought....


Until we heard bank story Rua

A close family member, on the eve of the banking crisis decided to take $150k from the National bank (which she wasn't convinced was all that secure - we disagree ) and put it is Wesptac which she thought was more secure. She was going to use it for house renovations.

Anyway same thing happened- Westpac didn't do Internet transfers for more than $1k at a time - she couldn't be bothered waiting for the bank to take two days to up the limit from $1k for her electronic transfers, or waste time going and getting a bank cheque, or carting $150k in cash to Westpac, so she sat on the computer for about an hour and duly deposited $150k in $1k lots from National bank to Westpac - Next day the builders arrived and just as they got set up a strange car pulled up the drive - it was the National Bank - they were worried that she had lost confidence in the bank and wanted to know why she had taken her money out.
They implied that they were worried that it was the start of a tide of depositors taking their money out.
She said no it wasn't the case- she just thought the Westpac was safer. But no sooner had they left than a bloke from Westpac turned up - he was just checking that it wasn't a case of fraud because they had never had someone who had deposited $150k at $1k a time and they wanted to check it was kosher. It was she told them - It was just their stuffed up system that didn't allow her to do a electronic transfers of a reasonable size that had caused the problem.

So we think that banks need to sharpen up their act and maybe they might be a wee bit nervous.