Piedmont, CA | East Bay; The Bureaucracy of Large Financial Institutions

Hi, I’m Erik Wolfers, founder and managing member of First & Main Financial. We’ve been helping clients with perfectly personalized financial solutions since 2001. Today, I want to talk a little bit about larger financial institutions.

I’ve mentioned this before in previous videos: part of the reason people work with us, is to shield them from larger financial institutions. We have instances where trying to get the counter financial institution to act – literally takes months. It’s almost as if they have developed internal processes to slow things and to try to keep money from moving away – which is strange because these institutions oftentimes have billions and billions of dollars that they’re responsible for. It’s curious that they don’t, instead of just putting up roadblocks and making things difficult, just train their people better, educate their people better, and work on making clients happy instead of driving them out as they seem to.

We recently had an episode with Chase, where getting them to move money for one of our clients literally took six months. Anything that we submitted to them was incorrect. Every time we submitted something there was a delay in their response. They always came up with something new – until finally we had them cornered after many many efforts and they had no choice but to move the money over – total Insanity.

I don’t know if these large financial institutions are just so large – and maybe they’re hyper focused on some level of profit – and so they just don’t want to invest in processes or people to the point where they can function relatively well as an entity. Often times it seems like they want to pay people as little as they can and then train them as little as they can, and then give their employees no accountability – the ability to be accountable or responsible. Every time you call it’s somebody different and nobody seems to be able to solve the anyting –  it’s like The Wizard of Oz where the only people that can do anything are behind a curtain and you can’t get to those people.

We fight these battles for our clients. It’s a shame and it’s crazy that companies do business this way. I think it says something about society as a whole in a larger sense that companies don’t want to empower their employees and allow them to solve problems and learn how to be problem solvers – and train them and educate them in a way where things could happen virtually instantly.

When we take care of things for our clients in seconds sometimes. We chases things to the end and wouldn’t it be great if everybody acted that way.

If you are looking for some financial guidance; whether for a one time financial plan or continuing advice on your investments, we invite you to meet with a First & Main Financial planner for a free consultation. We would be more than happy to sit down with you, assess your situation and review our services to help navigate your financial future.