EDITORIAL
“You have not left Cyprus, but you made purchases in Paris? We’ll tell you when your card is used…” is the new advertising campaign by Laiki Bank to promote its eBank alerts.
It’s a shame that the bank is putting the fear of God among its credit card users just to promote an alert service. Watching the ad campaign, one may ask, which is more useful, owning a credit card — which the bank says is most likely to be stolen and used by unauthorised people — or the eBank alert, which just confirms that the stolen card is now being used in Paris?
Cyprus currently lags behind the rest of the EU in the use of Internet and e-Commerce because right from the start, the government, the banks and every idiot who calls himself an expert only spoke about the dangers of the Internet, failing to point its zillions of advantages.
As a result there is great mistrust in the Internet and most of our corporations are not offering their services online, making people more afraid to shop over the Web and take advantage of better offers.
This misinformation has been cultivated by government ministers, high ranking public officials and many journalists who write the sensational news and yet have never used the Net, with very little knowledge of its security aspects.
While Cyprus has made a mess of Internet use simply because the public is afraid to use it, now we have a respectable bank enticing fear among credit card users, who are being bombarded with messages that this is an item that in most likelihood will be stolen.
If this is the case, then we should all return our credit cards to the bank and revert to cash and bouncing cheque as the favoured method of transaction.
This is also contrary to Laiki’s efforts to convince more of its customers to shift to online use, which not only improves service and offers flexibility, but also cuts costs at the bank, increasing its own staff productivity, which in the end boosts profits.
Instead of enticing fear, Laiki, which claims to be a tech-savvy bank, should have hammered the many advantages that Laiki eBank alerts and generally online banking provides.
It should also have used the campaign to highlight its extensive security features on how safe its eBank and even credit card systems are.
If they don’t know the security features, then they should call JCC Payments Systems, the credit card clearing house which they partly own, to find out how small the level of fraud is and how quickly this can be tracked and stopped compared to the millions of transactions made by Cypriots with credit cards.
It’s a shame that major banks and corporations comprise a cartel-like group calling themselves the Advertisers Association, that have yet to introduce any self-regulation, whereas press and broadcast complaints commissions are fully operational. And yet company executives get red-faced when anyone criticises the poor quality of their adverts.
Had we had similar ethics to those strictly adhered to by the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK, the bank’s “fear factor” ads would have been removed a long time ago.
