I have always believed that personal finance is all about the personal. People, people, people.
Equally, I strongly maintain that a personal finance journalist should be true to their job title. Think personal, be personal and write beautiful (and accurate) ‘personal’ finance copy.
It is why, over the years, I have always encouraged my team of reporters to get out of the office whenever possible, speak to readers fighting financial injustices or suffering financial detriment, and then take up the cudgels on their behalf.
Proverbial bums on seats in the office to please the editor? No chance. Get out and about, smell the grass and tell the story.
Sometimes, it might appear from the outside that it is just boring money issues that we write about (friends occasionally say that). Stories that come around again and again. Stock market booms and busts, house price bubbles and crashes, financial crises.
But these issues are not boring. Real people lie at their heart. It is why I always try to embellish any consumer story I write with pictures of those I am reporting on. Putting the personal into personal finance.
It is my view that personal finance journalists represent the very best that their profession has to offer. We – personal finance journalists – do more good than harm. We fight on behalf of the good old British personal finance consumer.
With this emphasis on the personal, it is not surprising that over the years I have railed against anything that impersonalises the personal finance world.
Over the years I have railed against anything that impersonalises the personal finance worldCall me old fashioned. Call me a luddite – I am, for better or for worse. But I passionately believe in local post offices and high street bank branches. They are essential components of what I call ‘community’, as are pharmacies, now under threat of mass closure as a result of NHS cutbacks.
Take these core foundations away and the community starts to fracture. Close the bank and the high street starts to disintegrate as shoppers are given one more excuse to jump in their car and visit the local retail park with their collection of big brand chain stores and the obligatory Starbucks.
It explains why, on many a winter’s morning, I’ve got up at the crack of dawn to show my face at some local protest over an impending bank branch closure.
I remember one particularly cold February morning in 2011 getting up at 4.30am so I could join a group of local residents, councillors, farmers and shopkeepers in Rhayader, Powys, angry over the axing of their Barclays bank.
It was so cold that morning my hand stuck to the outside door handle of my rusting Renault Megane (sadly no longer with us). My frozen fingers then would not work, making note-taking extremely difficult. It took me a day to recover from the experience.
All right, the journey on one level was fruitless because Barclays took no heed of the protests – nor of my presence – and still shut up shop. But I allowed those pained by the closure announcement to vent their spleen – to me and in the pages of the Mail on Sunday – and have their say.
No doubt Barclays walked away happy they had cut more costs out of their retail operations. HSBC is just about to do the same thing to Rhayader, a move that will leave the community – heaving in summer with tourists passing through to visit the Elan Valley – bankless.
But on another level they simply demonstrated the disconnect that currently exists between those who run our country’s banks and those who keep them in business (customers). Our biggest banks have turned their operations into impersonal monoliths interested only in reaping rich profits. Customer service is way down the corporate pecking order.
We deserve better. Yes, it is fine and dandy that HSBC is keeping its headquarters in Canary Wharf, London (thank you George Osborne for persuading them to stay). But its commitment to the UK is not stopping it from shutting 52 branches in the next 12 weeks, leaving some communities bankless. What is the point of a bank being headquartered here if its overriding policy is to shrink its high street presence to the size of a peanut?
The dehumanisation of financial services is everywhere. Automated call centres, internet-only financial businesses, manager-less bank branches. It has even extended to the advice arena with the advent of robo-advisers.
I do not want my finances to be looked after by a robo-adviser. No way. I want to be able to speak and meet with a living, breathing independent financial adviser, build a relationship, engender trust and embark upon a mutually beneficial long-term financial relationship.
Of course, innovation needs to be encouraged in all spheres of life. But do we really want to get to a stage where our financial world – indeed our whole personal world – has become wholly impersonal?
A world where bank branches are no more, independent financial advisers are mere memories, newspapers have gone the way of the dodo, and our lives are dictated by smart machines – everything from self-driving cars through to intelligent drones and robotic financial-trading machines.
Moshe Vardi, professor of computational engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, recently predicted that robotics and artificial intelligence would result in mass unemployment within 30 years.
Mr Vardi said: “I do believe that by 2045 machines will be able to do a very significant fraction of the work a man can do. The following question, therefore, seems to be of paramount importance: if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?”
It is not a future I look forward to, although I probably will not be around to endure it.
Long may the personal remain in personal finance. Long may it have a heart, not a byte.
Jeff Prestridge is personal finance editor of the Mail on Sunday
