Jobs and ethics

I was recently approached by a bank who's customer I am as they wanted to have a meeting to talk about thing, mainly about selling me all types of products. The meeting itself was rather interesting, as they had supplied me with some barely 20-year-old girl to sell cards and mutual funds and whatnot. Naturally she may not have had too much clue about what she was in fact selling or how ("You appear to pay currently 40e per year for this card and 0.5e per month for this other, if you pay us 5.7e per month, you'll get both..."), but this raised some questions about the ethics of doing business...

In this specific case besides the blatant problem of attempting to overcharge (especially as a different bank has already given me everything she was offering for free...) there is a question whether or not the bank would've looked out for my interest. Naturally I'm not a big customer, so I don't get to talk to the more experienced people, but trying to sell me some obscure mutual fund which invests into other funds with a distribution of 25% to stock funds and 75% into bond funds at a time during which we have the whole Greek situation going on with an argument that the fund has made 13% since last summer is questionable (just for record, comparing with a year back, I guess the only possible way to have actually lost money would've been to invest in NOK...). When asked about this, the bank's representative didn't really appear to be too much on the map. Neither when I asked her if she actually understood about all the hidden costs associated with her product (the answer was: "But it's free, there's no fee!").

But, this still begs the question of ethics and looking out for the customer's interest. Lack of knowledge is something that I don't like at all and if you sell me something, you're in a really sticky spot if you insist on knowing something that you in fact don't. That's just dangerous and not looking out for my interest. There's of course the separate case where the seller might in fact know better but doesn't care about me. For these cases I suggest you to read about the behavior of bankers during the 1980s in Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker. Business is business, but still...

This got me also thinking a bit about myself. What do I in fact know about my line of work and is it beneficial for my employer, my customers, or the society at large? I guess the scary answer is that I don't know. I would like to think so, but I'm not entirely convinced. But I do think about it and try to understand the world a bit more and based on my studies, there are certainly many cases where standards are beneficial for the customers and society. Are they always beneficial for the company? It depends...

Oh, and a final note, the meeting with the bank did go decently well. I reduced all of my costs to zero while retaining essentially the same products. Which is nice.

Inches

Dreams