Today, JPMorgan Chase & Co. will host an investor day during which it will showcase some of its new, cool innovations.
Too bad the bank can’t get a simple telephone call right.
Let me explain. I have a 101-year-old grandaunt. She still has her wits about her, but at 101, she’s not training for any marathon. She has a one-year CD with Chase that automatically rolls over. Now how exactly Chase sold an elderly woman a year-long CD with a rate of — I kid you not — 0.02% is beyond me. But let’s leave that small detail for a moment.
As my grandaunt approaches her 102nd birthday in April, I learned about this CD and determined that (obviously) it needs to be terminated at maturity. I mean, she’s not saving for the long term, people.
I called Chase.
“You or she needs to go to the branch” to terminate the CD, I was told.
“She’s almost 102,” I said. “She can’t get to the branch.”
“Well, you could talk to someone in the branch,” Chase said.
“OK, please have someone from the branch call me — I can give you my cell number,” I said.
“Oh, no, we can’t do that.”
“What do you mean you can’t do that?”
“I can’t have someone call you.”
“How is that possible? Chase is a business — you can’t call people you do business with?”
“No, you are going to have to call the branch yourself.”
“You realize it is 2017, and you are telling me Chase can’t call a customer?”
I got no response to that last question.
It is simply insane that a bank with a market capitalization of $323 billion cannot take a message and have someone from a branch call back a customer. For all of the proclamations about JPM’s technology prowess from Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO, there is this sort of nonsense that remains bank standard operating procedure. It is a disappointment, and in my opinion, makes all the bank’s other technology achievements moot. If you aren’t going to help a 101-year-old Holocaust survivor living in Queens, N.Y., you aren’t helping anyone.