Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for September 1st, 2009

I have run across a few interesting things that caused me to wonder what exactly are the banks in Canada doing to make folks want to be their customers?

All of the banks advertise (I don’t have their numbers spent on advertising, but no bank in Canada does NOT advertise). You can see some of the ads on this very web site some times, so they must have very deep advertising pockets, I do like the TD ads with the cranky old men, but that wouldn’t cause me to change banks for that reason alone.

Cheques

The first thing I noticed while collecting dues for a basketball team is that  I received 4 cheques from different parents, but I noticed the cheque design for all 4 cheques were EXACTLY the same, even though they came from 3 different banks. The security patterns on the cheques were exactly the same (I compared them under a strong light), the differences were:

1. Bank Information about which bank this is, address and logo
2. Customer information (name and such)
3. What was included in the MICR lettering at the bottom of the cheque

Other than that, there is no difference in the cheque.  In fact most of the banks use the same printer for cheque designs they simply order them, and thus this service is the same.

On Line Bank Interface

This is very different in terms of who designed the interface and such, but my guess is the “back end” of the software is exactly the same. What you can do is remarkably the same, typically there is a lot of advertising around it to get you to try new services with the bank.

Tomorrow, we continue this interesting case study.