It's a given that you'll have a showdown with your bank one of these days. How will things turn out? Depends on the bank.
There's reason to believe that Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce would give you the hardest time, and that Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Nova Scotia would try hardest to resolve the situation.
For seven years, the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) has provided a tally in its annual report of the number of complaints it receives regarding each of the major banks (the complaints can be about personal banking or investments).
Put all the reports together and you start to see some patterns in the way the major banks treat unhappy customers.
For example, CIBChas been the leader in six of seven years for complaints from individuals.
The ombudsman received 39 complaints from CIBC customers in the year to Oct. 31, compared with 34 for second-ranked Toronto-Dominion Bank and 20 for third-ranked Bank of Montreal. Royal Bank had 10 complaints, one more than the far smaller Laurentian Bankof Canada, while Scotiabank had 13.
These numbers might not sound huge, but they're still significant. The 39 CIBC customers who complained to the ombudsman would have first tried to resolve the matter within the bank, including a stop at CIBC's own internal ombudsman's office.
Those 39 people would have felt so aggrieved at their treatment by CIBC that they decided to pursue the matter to the court of last resort, which is the financial services ombudsman.
CIBC spokesman Rob McLeod said OBSI supported rulings by the bank's ombudsman in the vast majority of the 39 cases. He added that OBSI has overturned the CIBC ombudsman's rulings less than those of other bank ombudsmen.
"Solving customer issues has been -- and continues to be -- a major focus for CIBC," he wrote in an e-mail. "In fact, we were the first bank to establish an ombudsman back in 1994."
The ombudsman's tally of complaints makes for interesting reading, but it's not an especially precise measurement.
To help add some precision, let's look at complaints in the context of a bank's asset base and the number of branches.
The larger a bank's asset base and branch network, the more complaints it could be expected to generate, right? Actually, no.
Royal Bank's clients logged 108 complaints with OBSI in the past seven years and its asset base is about $409-billion, by far the largest of Canada's domestic banks. That's one complaint for every $3.8-billion or so in assets.
Royal Bank also has the largest branch network, at 1,311. That's one complaint for roughly every 12 branches it has in its network.
Anne Lockie, Royal Bank's vice-president of sales, said the bank started a campaign to improve complaint resolution five or six years ago. The reason was simple: People who had disputes with the bank were three times more likely to switch to another bank than those who had no problems, and customers who didn't get a satisfactory resolution to their problem were six times more likely to go.
"For us, this was a business issue," Ms. Lockie said. "We realized the importance of being able to handle problems well."
Clients of CIBC have filed 232 complaints with OBSI over the years. With 1,139 branches, the bank has had one complaint for about every five branches. With $283-billion in assets, it has a complaint for every $1.2-billion or so in current assets.
A Toronto consultant who has worked extensively with the financial services sector said CIBC hasn't historically scored among the leaders in surveys of retail customer satisfaction. "This has never been a strong suit for CIBC, while the Royal has usually been ahead of the pack."
These days, he added, the banks scoring best in customer satisfaction surveys include President's Choice Financialand ING Direct, which are branchless operations that do business electronically through computers, telephones and bank machines.
The thinking here is that the electronic transactions generated by these banks tend not to breed the types of complaints that get moved along to the financial services ombudsman. The kind of complaints that OBSI sees are more typically related to decisions made by humans rather than electronic glitches. PC Financial isn't listed in OBSI's annual reports (it's run by CIBC in conjunction with the Loblaw supermarket chain). ING has been the subject of eight complaints over seven years, including one this past year and zero the year before.
ING has $11-billion in assets, which casts the low complaint number in a slightly different light. Even so, eight complaints in seven years are barely worth noting.
Here's how some of the other major banks score in OBSI's complaint tallies:
Bank of Montreal: 110 complaints over seven years, which matches up against $258-billion in assets and 955 branches.
Scotiabank: 83 complaints over seven years; $282-billion in assets and 984 branches.
TD: 131 complaints; $302-billion in assets; 1,154 branches.
National Bank of Canada: 61 complaints; $78.4-billion in assets; 530 branches.
Sooner or later, you'll have a beef with your bank. These numbers give you a rough idea of what you'll be up against.
Rob Carrick