executive impact

MUFG to automate operations to free bankers for wealthy clients

5 Comments
By Taiga Uranaka

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Hehe..  I'll believe that when I see it.  any trip to a bank branch here is like going back in time with supervisors sitting behind the tellers and constant bits of paper being passed back and forth for the most simple transactions.

6 ( +6 / -0 )

I had to spend nearly 4 hours in an MUFG office signing a stack of papers with a ball point pen in order to set up a NISA. Every signature required me to write out my address in full, about 15 times. Later, a team of staff members discovered that I missed one stroke (a vertical line) of one kanji character in the address, so they called me again for an appointment to correct the stroke and then sign every single location where a corrected stroke was written.

I am not making this up. Tradition, inefficiency, yes. But I also think stupidity is also a factor somewhere along the line.

6 ( +6 / -0 )

Not only that, but MUFG has even managed to recreate that frustrating experience with its current "online banking" services, which must be the clunkiest low-resolution website ever. If you use an ATM to transfer funds, you can enter a recipient's account number and see the account name automatically to confirm it is the person or company you want. With MUFG's "online banking" you have to enter the account number and the account name TWICE, once in Kana and once in Kanji, and if there is the slightest mis-match the transfer is totally rejected. You must enter "Kabushikagaisha" or Ka) or (Ka in exactly the correct way, and even if you are lucky enough to do this successfully, the online confirmation form will often show it differently.

Remember, besides the Mitsubishi and UFJ in the MUFG group name, the English version of the Bank's name still retains a remnant of the "Bank of Tokyo". These three banks, of which at least two would have otherwise failed, were forcibly merged by J-Gov many years ago, in the hope that the merged group would find economies of scale and the successful parts would be retained while the unsuccessful parts would close. Instead, a single transaction is now handled by three separate offices. So if my company receives a payment from overseas sent to my local branch, a different office calls me to say the money has been received. The documentation for this is handled by yet another office, which sometimes sends it and sometimes doesn't, but I cannot contact them directly and every request, even for online banking services, involves multiple requests, paper form-filling and snail-mail correspondence, each with the correct count of hand-written Kanji, stroke count, hanko stamps and account names. I won't even mention the fact that I have one account where MUFG staff wrote my name in a slightly different form on page 1 and page 2 of my bank book, so that after almost two years of attempting an automated transfer request I am still going through cycles of rejection where each request is rejected in favour of the alternative format. Sorry, I just did.

Just how ignorant of all this Kanetsugu Mike must be to think he can introduce stuff like “robotics process automation” is beyond belief, except perhaps that by 2024 most of the senior citizens working in his Kafkaesque historic throwback "organization" will probably be dead .....

4 ( +4 / -0 )

Later, a team of staff members discovered that I missed one stroke (a vertical line) of one kanji character in the address, so they called me again for an appointment to correct the stroke and then sign every single location where a corrected stroke was written.

Been there, done that. But not only at MUFG though, I was at shinsei bank (great bank btw) and had to rewrite my signature 10 times at least because the first time I had written my signature I used 1 capital and lowercase letters and it was all incorrect etc. sigh. In the end I decided to change my registered signature.

Oh and they just SHOWED me the signature (which is suppose to be a step in the clients personal security) so I could copy it literally stroke by stroke which beats the purpose completely. Baffled.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Oh and they just SHOWED me the signature (which is suppose to be a step in the clients personal security) so I could copy it literally stroke by stroke which beats the purpose completely. Baffled.

lol, I also experienced that. I'd signed up so long ago my signature had changed from non-use and then the teller was like "no, it's more like this..." and just showed me the original.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

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