A funny thing happened on the way to the bank…
A couple of nights ago, a customer service representative from TD-Canada Trust phoned. We’re nominally still customers of said bank, having left a couple of small investments there for lack of will to change them when we switched everything else over some years ago. Beside the point. The CSR was calling to offer us the opportunity to purchase critical accident insurance (whatever that is) for a mere $8 per month. My wife took the call. A little out of character, instead of just telling the guy (who was just doing his job, after all) that she wasn’t interested and please leave her alone, she said something along the lines of not buying anything sight unseen.
The spiel that followed was disturbing in short form and second hand. He couldn’t give her more than a brief description over the phone. In fact, he couldn’t send her information either by e-mail or the regular sort unless she signed up for it first. After all, she could always opt out of it after reading the eventually forwarded information.
Let me get this right. The great and glorious TD-Canada Trust, one of the largest multi-national financial institutions in the Great White North, wants me to buy something without knowing what it is and in fact can’t tell me what it is unless I first agree to buy it. (A little circular, that.) Trust us, we’re a bank? I’d thought that negative billing, popularized in the late 90s by Robbers, I mean Rogers Cable, had gone out of style as a shady and borderline illegal practice. This is slightly different as you have to say yes first before you can find out what it is that you want to opt out of. Nice little loop hole, but hey, banks are known for their creativity in sucking money out of people – gotta love the service charges for computerized transactions, manipulation of interest rates, forcing of monetary policy, and “printing” their own electronic money. And you’ve got to love the expense ratios on mutual funds. Some of them are starting to get things right again and we bank with one of those.
But it’s okay, we can trust them. They’re a bank. (How do I loathe thee, let me count the associated scandals… Enron, derivatives, third world “development”, weapons financing links…)
And why is it they’re selling insurance in the first place? Insurance companies aren’t enough? Fingers in every pie, I guess.
