Coping with necessary evil

"YOU'VE gotta try this out," my best friend told me years ago. A gifted programmer, he was working on this new-fangled thing called internet banking. It was a novel concept back then, in the early days of the internet, and I was already the bank's customer so he arranged one of the first web-based banking accounts for me in the mid-1990s.

It was a revelation even then, the newest and arguably most innovative appearance of self-service banking. It's turned out to be the best thing that has ever happened to banking. EFTs have replaced cheques, quick logons have replaced going to the branch and, like everything else online, it's impossible to imagine life without it now.

But banks are one of those necessary evils. It's a bit like being married, with the world's most horrid parents-in-law. The outlaws. You have to deal with them, and be a part of their family. But it's a grudge relationship, and bank fees are a grudge purchase. Banks have always charged us too much in South Africa. Even when you think you're getting a good deal, like gambling, the house always wins.

But in the last two months I have found myself being impressed, even pleased, with my new bank. Every time I tweet about it I get reams of equally happy responses. I keep wanting to pinch myself. This is one of the Big Four banks, we're talking about. Nobody loves banks. Right? Nobody thinks banks have good service. Right? And yet, credit is due where credit is due.

You see, I recently switched to FNB, in part because of its charismatic CEO Michael Jordaan's insistence that I - and millions of other South Africans - were wasting R1-billion a year in bank fees because of our collective inertia about changing from banks that give us bad service. So, earlier this year, I took the plunge.

All of my conversations with Jordaan revealed his clear and prescient thinking about the future of how we interact with technology. Like Pieter Uys, the similarly forward-thinking CEO of Vodacom, Jordaan is an avid user of Twitter, where he engages his customers. Just stop for a moment and think about that: the CEOs of the country's largest company by customers and one of the big four banks are on Twitter, where customers can talk to them directly. I bank with both.

One of the South Africans I met at the South by South West conference earlier this year was an unassuming guy from FNB, there to spot upcoming trends. I felt a serious sense of post-bank-swap satisfaction. The SxSW trends are not always mainstream, but the plaid-wearing, tattooed geeks are a few years ahead of the curve.

That's what I want my bank to be doing: looking ahead instead of shoring up a banking system that seriously needs to move with the times. It's one of the reasons I've been so impressed with FNB: its website is like a normal website, not a clumsy, feature-deprived, hard-to-use bank website (and I have now used all of the big four). The FNB mobile banking site is a revelation too. And I pay significantly lower fees. In all, it's a remarkable social phenomenon.

The trick with technology, as any teenager can tell you, is adapting it to the user needs, not the other way around. Do what's good for your users, not your technology investments.

I feel like I was upgraded in the outlaws department. I even look forward to dinner at theirs.

Shapshak, whose former in-laws are wonderful, is editor of Stuff magazine. He was generalising about the outlaws