Regulator warns that banks are not there to look after customers’ interests
· CBC News
A CIBC financial adviser says she and her colleagues are “stunned” that a recent report by Canada’s banking regulator did not find widespread instances of customers who were upsold due to pressure on employees to meet sales targets.
“I can’t even explain to you how disheartened we all were,” says the financial adviser. CBC has confirmed her employment, but is not identifying the woman because she fears she would lose her job.
“We’ve been waiting for a year for this report,” she says. “It’s very hard, because it doesn’t feel accurate.”
The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) recently released the findings of a review of sales practices at the country’s six big banks. It was prompted by a series of Go Public investigations last year, revealing intense pressure on bank employees to sell customers products and services they may not need in order to meet sales targets.
Between May and November 2017, the FCAC interviewed more than 600 employees at BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank and TD, reviewed 100,000 pages of bank documents and looked at more than 4,500 complaints.
The regulator found that the requirement for retail banking employees to sell products and services “can increase the risk of misselling and breaching market conduct obligations,” but also said it “did not find widespread misselling during its review.”
The CIBC employee says “there obviously wasn’t good enough research,” and that she is “doing daily harm to customers” because of her upselling.
Pressure ramped up
The financial adviser — and several employees from other banks who’ve contacted Go Public — say the pressure to sell initially eased up after media reports last year, but then gradually worsened.
“Sometimes two, three times a day, you’ll get an email wanting to know where are your sales numbers at? What have you sold today?” says the financial adviser. “Now that this [FCAC] report has come out, the [sales] pressure is 100 per cent full force. It’s every single day. ‘How many products did you sell?'”
She describes feeling “desperate” to meet sales targets — by doing everything from tacking on a savings account, to extending a customer’s line of credit, to putting customers into bank-owned investments [when another option might be more suitable].
“You’re saying to customers, ‘Let’s go over your finances. I’m here and I want to help,'” she says. “But what we’re doing is trying to find products you don’t have, that we can sell you.”
In order to find sales opportunities — or “gaps” — the financial adviser says they’re instructed to pull a customer’s credit profile, which can affect someone’s credit score.
“You don’t feel good. All the time,” she says. “You go home and you know that you told somebody that they needed to put their money into an investment because you had gaps that needed to be filled.”
In an email to Go Public, CIBC spokesperson Caroline Van Hasselt wrote: “The actions described are not representative of our culture, which is focused on putting our clients at the centre of all we do. At CIBC, we are committed to continuously reviewing our business to ensure we do what’s right for our clients every day.”