The Change Your Bank campaign

CYB was a brief gesture of rebellion by a small group of busy media people all fed up by the excesses and abuses being perpetrated on the British people by the greedy bankers.

The campaign set out to encourage ordinary people – all bank customers, of course – to show their disapproval and their influence by telling their bank that unless they changed their practices on excessive bonuses and other financial mismanagement, their customers would change bank. Sound in theory, the campaign failed to gain traction simply because all the banks are pretty much as bad as each other, so most people view the hassle of changing as pointless. And the banks have been allowed to screw so much out of the current system for so long for their top people that few really believe there’s any way they can be stopped. Not unless change is forced upon them.

And that won’t happen soon, with the politicians we have.

A couple of articles from the campagn are featured here and can be downloaded as pdfs.

Good luck to anyone else who feels he or she can take on and really change Britain’s banks. Unfortunately, to succeed will require more time and commitment than I or my chums were able to give. To be honest I think it will probably take nothing short of a revolution. Maybe the French had the right idea.

Ken Burnett, who started CYB, can be contacted by email here.
The home page for Ken’s website is here.

December 2010

PS. There’s some hope when you change your bank. See here for the Evening Standard’s take on things, from 19 April 2011. And to convince you why we should protest, see below from The Observer, 23 October 2011. You couldn’t make it up.