Dialogue: Bank fees release me, let me go like Britain

Our banks trail those in England so badly in customer service that the People's Bank may not be such a bad idea, writes BARBARA EWING*.

A big bank in New Zealand eats money - my money.

First, I must admit that an actor is probably not any bank's favourite client, perhaps a few steps above a beneficiary.

It is not a romantic word to a bank manager or an insurance agent. In England, people in show business pay more than almost any other profession for car insurance and house insurance, as if we drag trouble behind us.

We have no regular income; it is a feast or a famine. I am not the only actor I know whose account might hold thousands of dollars or less than a hundred.

People with more regular sources of income than myself tell me that banks want regular, well-paid, reliable customers who take out loans and mortgages. In my circumstances, I have always been too terrified to do either.

These same people tell me that the bank is doing me a favour taking my money and if I had any understanding of economics, I would understand that.

Was I a tree-hugger who thought taxpayers' money should be spent on banks for the poor?

(I don't think of myself as poor but I didn't see how to explain that. I also hesitated to divulge that I passed Economics I at Victoria University. It was many moons ago and I think I passed by only one mark.)

All the same, the big New Zealand bank does eat my money. It does not matter if I am not here in New Zealand; it does not matter if my New Zealand chequebook remains resolutely closed.

Regularly, month after month as my account sits quietly here with my hundreds or thousands (being used, I presume, on bank business), inroads are made.

Every month, even though I am minding my business 19,000km away (and am not making any charge at all to the bank to do with my money what it will), these things called bank charges operate, and so my balance recedes.

I have at last realised that it may be the 21st century, but when I don't have much money it would be cheaper to keep the lot under a mattress, like my great grandmother apparently did in 1897.

The less money I have, the more the bank seems to cost me, and, as I have recently been advised of statistics that say the lower 50 per cent of the New Zealand population have become poorer since 1984, it is unlikely that I am the only person with this problem.

You may sigh and think it's the same the whole world over. But it isn't.

Because I live partly in England, I have a bank account there as well, in a big English bank, the Abbey National.

From this account (and as a customer I am just as financially unrewarding and just as irregular for this bank) I have the following services:

* I pay direct-debits for household bills and credit cards.

* I automatically get my next chequebook without having to order one.

* I have an overdraft facility that I can use at any time.

* I can ring the bank from anywhere in the world at any time and ask about my balance and transactions or initiate new transactions.

* I can take money from a "hole in the wall" cash machine.

* I can pay for anything in any shop by using my bank credit card.

* I make cheque transactions all the time.

For all this activity, as long as my account is in credit by £1, I pay no fees, no transaction charges, no bank charges, nothing at all, ever.

And I have never been made to feel that I am a burden on the bank and that it is doing me a favour in taking my money. My cheque account also pays interest.

Some English banks do charge fees. I cannot tell you for sure why people stay with them when their banking could be free.

The interest charged, or paid, seems to be similar from bank to bank, but perhaps this changes when you are talking millions.

Maybe it is because their fathers, and their fathers before them, used a certain bank and people are loath to change, even though these days you are unlikely to know your bank manager.

Or perhaps (I know at least two people to whom this applies) it is that royalty uses a certain bank and so there is kudos in having that bank's name on your chequebook.

Or perhaps there are secrets in banks that only the very rich are privy to. My Economics I pass is no use here. If there are such secrets, I shall probably never know them.

Some of the larger British banks recently tried to bring in big charges for people who take money out of cash machines belonging to banks other than their own. Britons rose in uproar. "It's our money," they said, and the idea was quietly dropped.

So I have followed the discussions, comments and arguments about the People's Bank with interest. I understand it will charge fees, but lower fees. I understand it will operate out of post offices, which seems eminently sensible, especially in small towns.

It supposedly cannot get exceedingly rich because it will not involve itself with big commercial business (and so is unlikely to cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions to be bailed out, as the Bank of New Zealand did).

I have heard about Taranaki's TSB Bank, which has gone halfway at least to giving free banking and seems to be thriving. But that is not suitable for everyone because not everyone can keep $5000 in credit all the time.

Again the rule applies: the less money you have, the more it costs you, as if somehow you need to be punished.

(The same kind of principle may dictate that New Zealand is a society that has a free-phone for air passengers to book, but not one for bus passengers.)

When I mention my English bank to New Zealanders in the know, they tell me that because England has such a large population, and that many people take out mortgages and loans and earn the bank its profit, it can afford to let unrewarding clients like myself have free banking.

Yet I read and hear everywhere in New Zealand the opinion that if, by chance, the People's Bank should surprise those people in the financial know and be popular; if it should take too many customers from the big banks, the big banks will simply lower their charges.

Does that mean they could afford to do it anyway? Just asking.

* Barbara Ewing, a writer and actor, divides her time between London and New Zealand.