The Transition

 

My wife and I belong to a credit union in our neighborhood here in Bloomington, Mn, and have enjoyed it. It is well run and offers a variety of useful electronic financial and banking operations for consumers which we have seamlessly enjoyed.

 

We had belonged to a credit union in Burnsville 10 years ago and these corporations buy and sell each other like promiscuous male and female sluts, and the consumers realize no advantage from it. The transition 10 years ago was so rocky that we switched companies and were glad we did.

 

Now, this past week, another bigger credit union bought out our sole, stand-alone local bank, and the transition is a nightmare, and the angry consumers that stormed that bank last week were about to riot.

 

Many of these young depositors and users used only that credit union, so when their work checks did not deposit, and their credit union debit cards and credit cards would not function, these young people are desperate and hurting: they have no money to buy food, buy gas, pay rent and pay day daycare. This mess is doing real harm and it was all avoidable.

 

 

We are older with deeper pockets, and have learned from painful experience never to rely on just one financial institution any longer in case they melt down as our neighborhood credit union is undergoing right now. We have another bank set to go with separate credit cards and separate credit cards, so we can function until this mess is sorted out, or we leave them for another credit union in Edina, which we will be doing.

 

This new credit union will never allow our work check deposits are to be pending, never shown until posted. They will never allow us electronically to go between bank institution websites to move funds around.  Our credit cards amounts and transactions do not interface with the new bank’s software. The replacement credit union’s online banking system will not let us do anything even though we have the new credit union’s website and proper user names and passwords. This fiasco is worse by far than the failure of institutional transition that we experienced in Burnsville 10 years ago. we are pulling the plug once again.

 

One of the reasons that many people, like myself are conservatives, is that if a system in place is working well, smoothly, efficient and humming along, it is reckless to replace it with another system, often a case that we should not break what does not need fixing. But these fools rushed in where angels feared to tread.

 

Banking and investment firms buy and sell and switch names like one would switch lovers casually if one was promiscuous, but transitions, always painful and messy at the best of times, do not go well nowadays, it seems, now that the people running it seem much less attentive, skilled, mindful and experienced at taking over old systems, and bringing in the new with minimum pain and disruption. They are eager and willing to make changes, but their arrogance and confidence is not matched by skillful mastery and competence, workplace attributes that are increasingly rare as American institutions now struggle to accomplish what was routine and easy 10 or 20 years ago.

 

They could just not leave well enough alone, and it hurts the consumers—perhaps the investors will benefit somehow.