The American Bankers Association had assembled at a convention in 1923 and hired humorist, Will Rogers, to give a keynote address to the assemblage. Noting the scandals that had riddled the banking industry over the previous two years, Rogers began his delivery with, “You have a wonderful organization. I understand you have ten thousand folks here. And, if you count the ones in the various federal prisons, it brings your total membership up to around thirty thousand.” Much like in the twenties, the present day financial woes can be at least partially attributed to the easy credit, high limits and greed within our financial industry.

With this crisis they helped create, the banks have reversed their previous policies. As poet Robert Frost once noted, “A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.” A former US Congressman, Bob Bauman reported that his bank of many years cut his credit card limit because of “recent information from a credit reporting agency.” Bauman informed the person that he called about this that he was looking at his combined credit report as he spoke to her and there was no such indication. After a consultation with her manager, the woman advised that his limit had been raised one-third. This experience is the rule rather than the exception. It appears as if the banking industry is run by uncaring computer software programs that still have some flaws to be programmed out.

In a survey conducted by Global Finance Magazine, the US Banks are at the bottom of the barrel as far as safety. The safest bank in the world, accord to the GF publication, is Germany’s KfW. Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is rated in the top ten in the world for safety of investments and many other Canadian banks are rated in the top 50 banks in the world.

What happened to the US banking institutions? Are their failures the result of the unregulated greed that stimulated easy credit, high limits and loans to people who didn’t qualify for loans? Or was it from the lack of oversight from the Congressional watchdogs appointed to monitor their activity? Or a combination of both? I suspect the latter.

All of this points out the underlying problem facing business people today. A tanked economy in which the Federal response is to throw huge amounts of money at it, a tactic that does not appear to have wrought any change, a crashed banking system, shrinking markets, while the changes being enacted by our Fed are only contributing to the problem. What to do, what to do?

When the market shrinks, a business has to go after a bigger share of the market in order to survive, even grow during the hard times. Cutting waste from an operation and still aggressively pursuing the competitors’ accounts requires a business partnering with a company that can increase the exposure to greater sales, improve the efficiency of internal support operations and clean up and manage the data. These changes allow for improved efficiency of sales, customer service and accounting/reporting activities. Imagine the results of having your people focus on what they do best, with all the support activities contracted out. If the sales staff were provided with screened, qualified leads, the customer service department were able to focus on after-sales-service and accounting had a simplified system with which to monitor the activities, how much more business could a small to medium sized firm accomplish?