When people ask where I live, I tell them I’m close to Ubud’s Financial District. This raises eyebrows until I point out the row of banks all huddled together at the east end of the main road. If Ubud has a Financial District, surely this is it.
I’ve been patronizing the same bank for over five years now. I selected it because it seemed to be a stable national institution and it was ever so convenient, being located just a two minute stroll from my house. I didn’t have to visit very often, but it was nice to know it was there. Then one day about six weeks after my latest visit I went to make a withdrawal. The bank was gone.
The ATM had been ripped out and the huge generator that used to take up most of the parking area out front had disappeared. A metal gate was locked down over the entrance, and so much rubbish had blown against it that the place looked as if it had been abandoned for years. On the gate was a small, torn, hand-written sign, “Pindah ke Andong”.
Well excuse me, but it seems a bit casual for a national bank to just slip away in the night like that. I felt quite indignant as I mounted my electric steed and headed up Jalan Andong to see where my financial institution had washed up. Fortunately it wasn’t very far along, or I would have been forced to transfer my affections and modest transactions to a bank closer to the Financial District.
Going to the bank has changed a lot in the past eight years. There are computers now, and you take a number from the machine when you come in. A polite man with a billy club and a pistol escorts you to your seat under the television. Service is big factor when choosing a bank, and it ranges from the rude snarls of the tellers at one of the largest institutions in town to the heartfelt can’t-do-enough-for-you at a smaller bank at the end of the Financial District. Ibu Snarl has been known to interrogate foreigners about their status and finances and rudely deny them bank accounts if they didn’t have a KITAS. At the other end of town another bank is happy to open an account for you, KITAS notwithstanding, no extra charge for the smile.
Then there was the little hole in the wall bank my friend Kathy used to patronize. It was so tiny only a couple of clients could be served at any time. The tellers were so transfixed by the high drama of the television shows they watched constantly that no transactions could be undertaken until after the denouement. Once Kathy entered the bank at a few minutes before three, needing some money for the weekend. The teller apologized and told her the bank was already closed, as the manager had a ceremony. “But I need the money urgently!” Kathy told him. “How much do you need?” he enquired. She told him, and he lent her Rp 300,000 from his own pocket on the spot. Try that at Citibank.
When I first came to Ubud, few Balinese had bank accounts. If you wanted to contract land or pay a builder, you withdrew bricks of cash and carried them around town in a brown paper bag. No one seemed to find this odd, and no one was ever mugged that I heard of. These days you can transfer rupiah into other people’s bank accounts in heartbeat with internet banking.
But things are not always so straightforward. My bank has plenty of computers and I know I’m in there, because every time I turn up they know where to find me. So when I arrived one day to make a withdrawal and discovered I’d forgotten my bank book at home, I thought this would be no problem. I was in the computer, right? I went up to the Customer Service Lady, and told her the situation. She regarded me with shock; she was not allowed to give out bank account numbers. But this was ME, I pointed, one of the handful of foreigners with an account in this bank and well known to all. Muttering, she consulted the bank manager, who indicated that she might just this once be allowed to entrust me with my own account number.
First she consulted a hand-written ledger for about ten minutes, until I indicated that I was pretty sure the information she sought was in her computer. Another five minutes passed before she motioned me to sit down at her desk. In a whisper she walked me through all my security questions. Full name, nationality, birth date, address, phone number? Mother’s maiden name? Colour of maternal grandmother’s eyes? Date of dog’s last vaccination? The bank manager observed all this from the next desk. Finally, finally, the lady wrote my bank account number in very tiny figures on a piece of paper and passed it reluctantly over the desk to me.
So I filled in my withdrawal form and took it to the teller, who asked for my bank book. I told her I’d forgotten it. Sorry, she says, you can’t make a withdrawal without your bank book. Now, the manger and the Customer Service lady both knew I wanted to make a withdrawal, they both knew I couldn’t do it without my book yet they let me go through the whole process of obtaining my account number anyway. I had plenty of time to mull this over as I walked home to get the book.
Recently a cooperative in Karangasem was closed by police, because it had been paying an interest rate of 150% to its members for the past three years. Finally someone in the police decided that there might be something irregular going on.
