Sunday, October 5, 2008

Consumer banking sells the structured products

Comment posted in my blog

I come from the banking industry and I am really ashamed about how these people from the consumer banking side conduct themselves.

It is the banking industry's secret that the lower calibre people in the bank are always chuffed into the consumer banking side. Managers from the consumer banking side also doesn't care about qualifications or training of the people they recruit as RMs or Investment Consultants. These unqualified people who join the consumer bank for the vain reason of being able to boast/ pose that they are "bankers" or "investment experts", even when they don't really have the substance or depth.

However, the conduct of the consumer banking divisions over the CLS scandal is downright unethical and heartless. It shows they don't care about the common folk, they just want to retain their undeserved titles.

We don't see such short-term-oriented and unscrupulous conduct occuring in the bank's Treasury dept/ Institution dept/ Corporate Bkg dept. Even in Private Bkg, I heard that Private Bkg RMs (those who serve customers with more than S$5m cash) refused to promote the structured investments to their customers cos they are afraid to lose their customers' long term business. In fact the Private Bkg RMs cannot see any reason why they should lock their customers' money into a 7-year, illiquid, fishy, structured investment.