A few days ago I was watching the Discovery channel and in a factory, one of the workers used to have a job in the banking industry before the crisis. As much of the crisis went through the banking system into the real economy it sounds like it’s quite hard to find or keep your job. So you would expect that banking services should have improved even in Romania?
I’m from Eastern Europe and banks over here don’t make any efforts to help small businesses. High taxes, obscure policies and bad services happen not because there isn’t enough competition but because there isn’t a culture of small business banking. It took almost one month to have one of my cards re-issued, and they were expecting to go pick up the card from the same location where it was issued 2 years ago (which was way far from my current location).
The thing is that while we had some big crashes in the financial industry Worldwideand the credit went down, the basic banking operations still exists; unless we stop using money, all businesses need a way to cash in money from the customers. So it seems that no matter how hard things are, banks here
So I decided to have a look and see how things are looking.
In a total contrast, each time I look at the financial institutions in U.S. I’m amazed at the efforts they are putting into marketing their services. For example, to grow the sales force, North American Bancard created a site for the North American Bancard Agents and created the North American Bancard Linkedin company profile. So they are using social networking!
Also, they do provide much more services that a regular bank here (solutions for Credit, Debit, EBT, Check Conversion and Guarantee, Gift & Loyalty Cards and much more).
They seem to have a quite aggressive plan to grow their customer base, which is currently around 100000 businesses (it’s amazing what competition and a strong culture of supporting small businesses can do) . And are there any jobs? Sure, look at the North American Bancard Jobs.
