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With banking increasingly done online without paper statements, when an account holder dies it seems there is less chance of their account being known to the executor of the estate to distribute, unless it is mentioned in their will. Will this lead to a windfall of unclaimed bank accounts going into govt coffers, or do banks or govt make some attempt to locate next of kin, to inform them. Does this need some banking law amendment?
Also along these lines, is moving everything online going to open the elderly up to more financial abuse? Financial abuse done from a keyboard, is much less risky than going into a bank to see a teller. An elderly person may still have sufficient capacity to write a cheque, even if they can’t use the latest internet gadgetry.
The tensions between the technophobe and the technophile eh?
As I’ve commented before, when I began a career in ITC development (then IT), a boss said to me:
“people should drive technology, rather than technology driving people”.
Let’s do this ‘because we can’ is never that bright an idea but it has become the way things are done.
Thank Christ I left all that behind a while back.
It’s probably why many seem to have lost their imaginations (politicians and the managerial class in the public service – aided and abetted by the cult of neoliberalism).
We could have had both – i.e. catering for the technically literate, and the technically illiterate.
We could have had Post Offices co-located with Kiwibank branches repurposed to become all-of-govt (local and central) service centres. Opportunity lost because we constantly go for the cost-cutting/short term/neolib agenda and-all-that-goes-with-it.
Tellers and person-to-person interaction is sooooo passé (/sarc)
I do know that in the days of The Maori Trust Office when it was co-located with the Colonial Office (TPK), a couple of people made strenuous efforts to locate people owed money – even then often not that successfully.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018829046/lockdowns-exteme-response-says-uk-academic
This guy makes the point that the UK and NZ have managed Covid with different settings that need to fit the country’s situation, if there was proper planning and forecasts. But I think the UK wanted the entitled people’s way – which was to wish away the annoying new practices that had to apply to all the public including the smart middle class. As the saying goes ‘Once the horse has bolted, it’s too late to close the gate’. New approaches to contain the horse are needed.
Monetary policy. Get clued up and amaze your friends who probably believe that It Is a Good Thing to have skyrocketing housing prices and interest rates going up in order to tame the demand so that everyone has to pay more as a way of controlling obliquely what should be damped down and \ gradually with a few (dirty word) ‘disincentives’.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/BU2202/S00092/monetary-policy-easing-and-the-distribution-of-wealth-in-new-zealand.htm
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