If you think the “progress” made by modern banking helped to create or exacerbate the recent economic crash (perhaps by bidding up real estate and credit markets to unsustainable levels, or by using rapid-fire computer models to trade faster than human overseers can think) then you’ll love the State Bank in Oakwood, Texas.
As much as possible, everything is still done the way it was 100 years ago. They keep your account under your name, not a number (though a number is assigned, because banking regs require it, it’s never used) and they have only one computer — which they only turn on when they have to, to communicate with the Federal Reserve.
What I find interesting about this is that it’s still possible for a business to exist this way. Sure, there are no modern conveniences, like ATMs, or telephone or online banking, but the bank still functions. It’s still paying employees. It still has customers.
And, frankly, some of those modern conveniences have been just about as frustrating as they have been convenient. I never accelerated my spending so much as when I first got a bank card — and that was before debit machines! Just the ability to go to the automated teller and withdraw cash whenever I felt like it, instead of making a special day-time trip to the bank and planning ahead for the weekend, made it so much easier to spend and spend and spend.
So I can appreciate the fact that a slowed-down, traditional-in-the-extreme bank would have some advantages. Good for them.
Grant Hamilton
4 Responses to “America’s oldest bank doesn’t like change”
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So torn. The curmudgeonly luddite in me cheers. The convenience-obsessed sloth in me shudders. What to do?
I would like the option, at least, of living in a non-instant world, so I could try it for a few months, see if it was really better (as I remember it, in some ways), or whether my thoughts are demented by nostalgia (frikkin Danger Mouse cartoons! Long story).
Ah, I remember the days when I balanced the general ledger on a big ‘ol sheet of paper on a huge freakin’ adding maching…brings a tear to my eye…
I think a lot of people have a hankering for the older, slower days — and they might indeed be “demented by nostalgia”, but there are some things that are inarguably worse now.
Our society seems to be in a race for everything to be faster and cheaper. But cheap things break more.
[...] Aside from the fact that “SafeBank” wouldn’t have any bricks-and-mortar outlets, being an online-only entity, it strikes me as pretty similar in ethics to the way banks used to be. [...]