Lessons in Banking: Widows in Their Distress

In 2006 I re-entered the workforce after many years as a stay-at-home mom, grandmother and helper in my husband's small business. For the first year and a half I had a small glimpse from the inside, at a low level, of one of the banks that was a major player in the sub-prime mortgage crisis that helped bring the US economy to its knees in 2008. 

I experienced a corporate climate that talked a lot about integrity, but didn’t seem to understand what it meant, that seemed to profit from exploiting the poor and uneducated while catering to the wealthy, but was also willing to exploit the wealthy if they weren’t savvy enough to act in their own best interest. I regularly was faced with little situations that created big ethical dilemmas for me as a Christian. I left that bank, which I will refer to as TBTF (Too Big To Fail) and went to work for a credit union, which has made it much easier to hold my head up in polite society. 

In my short career as a customer service representative at TBTF Bank I had several experiences that shaped my current opinions about regulation of the financial industry and, in particular, the huge multinational banking corporations. This blog post is the story of one of those experiences.

This is not me, but you get the idea.

 

In 2007, my job involved making phone calls to new TBTF Bank clients all over the country to “welcome” them. I had been at TBTF over a year, long enough to have taken several mandatory training courses on compliance with government regulations. One of these was a course about our responsibilities and procedures to comply with a California law against financial abuse/exploitation of the elderly. That law required that any financial institution employee who was aware of a possible violation was personally responsible to report it. Since we spoke with TBTF Bank clients in California on a regular basis, call center employees took this course annually.

http://www.bewiseonline.org/what-is-financial-abuse/ 

One day I called an elderly widow in California, who was eager to talk when I asked if she had any needs or problems regarding her new TBTF Bank accounts. She said she was glad I called and she hoped I could help her. She told me how she had gone to a local branch because they were advertising good interest rates on savings. She knew when she went in that she was only interested in liquid FDIC insured accounts. She said that she explained from the start that at her age she didn’t want any of her money at risk. 

When this lady told the representative how much her initial deposit would be, she was ushered into an office where a man talked to her about options she didn't understand, but she repeated to him that she didn't want any of her money at risk. She was sure he knew that she wanted to keep her funds liquid and she left thinking all her money at TBTF  Bank was in FDIC insured savings and money market accounts.

Later this elderly client went in to make a large withdrawal to buy a new car to replace her old unreliable one. She also had promised her granddaughter that she would fund her college education and it was almost time to pay for her first semester. She discovered that very little of her money was accessible to her. She said that the man who had talked to her in his office when she opened her accounts "grinned like the Cheshire Cat" and told her that her money was in safe investments, but that it was too soon  to take any of it out.

Since I worked for the retail banking side of TBTF, I had access to look only at her FDIC insured deposit accounts, and I could see that there was not enough money in any them to buy a car or pay for a semester of college. 

And of course this is not the actual widow I spoke with.

This widow, who was in her eighties, wasn't very far into her story before she was crying and begging me to help her. She asked me to come to her home and look at her paperwork to see if there was anything I could do. She was terribly disappointed to learn that I was calling from  Texas. 

I asked if she had any family nearby who might be able to look at the papers with her.  She said she had family out of state, but would be ashamed to tell any of them what had happened. She asked me to call her local branch and tell them to give her enough of her money to pay for the car and her granddaughter’s tuition. She gave me the name of the man with the Cheshire cat grin and of course when I looked him up I found that he was in the investment arm of the corporation.

After I got off the phone with this lady, who was still crying, I called the branch in California, but no one there wanted to talk to me. They said yes, they knew the widow was upset, but she had no reason to worry.  Everything was fine and I didn’t need to worry about it either. I’m sure they thought I was overstepping my bounds. 

I went to my supervisor and asked her to listen to the recording of my phone conversation with the client. She put me off even when I practically begged her for help. She assured me that no TBTF employee would put a client’s money into investments without their informed consent and made it clear that she was too busy to be bothered. 

That’s when I reviewed the material from the compliance course and concluded that I would be out of compliance if I didn’t follow the procedure outlined in the course material. I went online and reported the information as it had been relayed to me by the elderly lady. This was an internal reporting procedure that just relayed the information to higher-ups in TBTF who were responsible for compliance with state and federal regulation. 

I then went to my supervisor and told her that I had done this. She was livid. She informed me that this process was in place to report financial abuse of the elderly if we observed it from people outside the company, like a family member or caregiver. It wasn’t intended to report "our own."

I soon became uncomfortably aware that the managers in my department had gone into a meeting. Shortly thereafter a hard copy memo was placed on all the employees' desks informing us that we were to consult our immediate supervisors before we submitted a report of possible violation of the California financial elder abuse law. I knew that this requirement was contrary to the California law. 

I handed the page back to my supervisor and said, as my heart pounded, “I’m just going to suggest that if you haven’t sought approval from the legal department to distribute this memo, you probably want to do that.” 

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, so I repeated myself.  Before long all the memos were picked back up and shredded. I asked my supervisor if she or anyone had listened to the recording of the call yet. She admitted that they hadn’t. I asked her again to just listen to the call. To her credit, she and other management did eventually pull and listen to the call and she admitted to me, “You were right. That was appalling.”

It's so easy to tell this story five years later, but at the time it was agonizing. I began crying and praying as soon as I got in my car to drive home that day. I felt so angry and frustrated and just plain sorry for that lady and her granddaughter.

I kept monitoring the widow's accounts to see if any of her funds had been deposited into her savings or FDIC insured money market account. I checked a couple times a week and never saw any evidence of that. Finally I made an anonymous  phone call from home to the California elder abuse hotline. 

Headlines from fall of 2008

I don’t know how this story ended, but in the fall of 2008, almost a year after I had left TBTF Bank, I thought of that lady when the sub-prime mortgage crisis came to a head and the American economy nearly collapsed. I hoped and prayed that her life savings was out of the stock market before then and that she had been able to help her granddaughter get off to college.