Fortis is still a thorn in our sides. Looks like the beginning of the problem was one lone idiot there and then a crappy system around her that's proved itself incapable of dealing with the consequences of her idiocy. Oh well. Maybe someday Fortis will stop fucking up and I'll be so happy I could cry. See? I'm accentuating the positive and it's not even here yet! And then at the end of our contract, I'll rush to another provider so fast my head will spin. I lay into Belgians, I know, but besides some minor trouble last December (which they compensated me for) I've had no problems with ING -I've even been very happy with what I've got, considering I pay basically no fees. And while my colleagues, who almost to a man do business at KBC, are annoyed by the high fees and crap service, they've had no remarkable problems there. Fortis seems to be an especially incompetent institution (and an expensive one too - their rates are high). If you're ever in the position where you must live and bank in Belgium, I strongly advise against Fortis, and in the same vein reccommend ING.
But then the problem with Belgian banks is that they're very branch-based. I have a feeling all banks everywhere used to be like that, like when my grandfather was in the biz in northern England - he retired about 40 years ago. Back in the day when you talked to your neighbours and the bank manager could make decisions instead of a centralized computer saying yes or no, that made really good sense, I think. The bank was some sort of part of the community and has some familiarity with it. I'm making it sound very idyllic - I'm sure it was frustrating as hell at the time, but back in the day branches being the base of the system made sense.
Today it makes no sense. When your eligibility for a mortgage is calculated using defined evaluation tools, when people are tearing all over a city getting money from dozens of different machines, when everybody has a telephone and half the people have a computer in their home to allow them to reach some sort of centralized authority, and most importantly, when you've stripped bank managers of their non-petty power and when the branch is no longer part of the community - just another office people commute to - it makes no sense at all to force customers to have a 'home' branch. All that results in is situations like ours, wherein we had the bad fortune to use the Rue de l'Hotel des Monnaies branch of Fortis and be served by a bloody idiot who continues to fuck things up named Sonia Declerck, simply because our landlord took us there to create our deposit account. And now we have to clean up the problem with the same incompetents who caused it. Who knows? If we used another Fortis branch, things could have been different. We'll never know, because we'll never use Fortis again in any circumstances.
And with ING, I remember I had a problem with my card whilst Christmas shopping last year and popped into the branch at the top of Avenue Louise (Saint Gilles-Porte Louise branch) where the teller refused to help me in the flattest, rudest terms I've ever heard from a white collar worker in the private sector. Luckily I was just a 15 minute walk from my home branch, Bruxelles-Jardin du Roi) where they are all beautifully polite and helpful. But it did make me wonder if I'd be all 'yay, ING!' if I had to deal with the bitch at Saint Gilles-Porte Louise on any sort of regular basis. San Francisca, who also banks at ING, I think out of loyalty to her Dutch husband, used to bank at another Avenue Louise branch. She found it so dreadful that she switched to mine. She is from the States and does have rather slavish notions about customer service, but she's very happy now.
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