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I have often contemplated the reason why large commercial financial organisations seem to treat customers suffering from debt problems with apparent contempt.

Taking all of the emotion out of the argument it just seems to me that banks are missing a great commercial opportunity to be seen as ‘the good guys’ for a change if they were to implement responsible and compassionate debtor friendly collection policies.

Banks spend millions each year on attracting new customers. By working with those relatively small numbers of clients that fall into financial difficulties a ’smart’ bank could pull a major PR coup by having a demonstrably caring policy of going out of their way to help and retain such customers in their time of need.

I once thought that the UK Co-Operative Bank may choose to live up to their ‘ethical bank’ slogan and implement such a strategy. This has never materialized however and their claim to be more ‘ethical’ than their competitors certainly does not seem to extend to their policy of working with indebted clients as they are no different than the larger banks in reality.

I would be very interested to read the views of other readers as to why they believe that banks seem to uniformly treat people with debt problems as second rate citizens.