Chapter 6 - Banking


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When you are in Bangkok you must visit the head office of the Bangkok Bank on Silom Road. It is like a palace! There is a very impressive mosaic on the wall, made up out of tens of thousands of hand made tiles. But to me even more impressive was the endless row of cashier ladies sitting there side by side at partitioned desks. I can't remember correctly but it must have been at least 30 of them. Once you finally make up your way to one of those ladies, which can take anything between twenty minutes and one hour, an interesting process begins. Let's assume you want to cash in a cheque, then the girl will take the cheque, sign it and stamp it. Then she passes it back to her supervisor who again signs and stamps it. Then she in turn passes the cheque to her superior who again signs and stamps it. Then the cheque gets passed back to the cashier girl who puts it into her drawer and finally gives you cash. For Germans this is a very interesting process because we are used to have banks with minimum staff who can do everything in one go and actually have computers which they use to look up your account data. In 1993 there were no computers for the cashiers in Thailand.

What was also very fascinating was the fact that money transfers between the different Thai Banks had not been possible. That meant that you actually had to withdraw cash from one bank, then had to carry it to the other one and to deposit it there. This was probably the reason why many companies paid the salaries in cash. So on the 1st of each month you saw accountants of those companies who withdrew huge amounts of cash and carried it to their offices. Amazing that one hardly would read anything in the newspapers about those girls being mugged. Remember that if you have any banking to do, try not to do it on the 1st of a month, because this guarantees longs waits in front of the cashiers.

Anyway, Victor did not like the fact that cash got carried around. So he let all the staff open an account at the Siam Commercial Bank where the company also had its accounts. Excellent idea with one flaw...the Thai staff wanted to see their money or simply wanted to have it deposited into another bank. And here comes the amazing thing: On salary day they all gave their ATM Cards, PINs and Post-It notes with numbers on them to our messenger Sam, who then went to the Siam Commercial Bank to withdraw all the individual amounts and then distributed the cash to the staff. That is what I call honest and loyal !

Carrying large sums of cash around became kind of a sport, during the Asia crisis 1997/98 when people stopped trusting the Thai Banks and withdrew all their money to deposit it with foreign banks. During that time one could see people with paper bags full of cash walking out of Thai banks straight into Deutsche or Hongkong Chianghai Bank. And nothing happened to them.

So one thing we learn from the fact that you can carry around large sums of cash without being mugged is that Bangkok is actually a very safe place to be.


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