THE three working days in this week were unique in so many respects. After a four-day work-free Sallah holiday, Lagosians, especially those with white-collar jobs, eventually resumed at their duty posts, to continue from where they stopped the previous week.

The usual hustle and bustle associated with many offices in the city finally returned, with workers relishing their experiences of the just concluded Sallah holiday and the festivities that went with it.

Interestingly, the banking sector, normally every nation’s economic backbone, also re-commenced activities, with the nation’s financial institutions witnessing a run on their limited facilities.

The banking halls became a beehive, with most of the banks’ managements at their wits’ ends on how to organise themselves to deliver the much-professed value for money to their customers. Customers had thronged the banking halls as early as the gates of the financial institutions were opened for business and the stampede did not subside until the gates were shut to officially indicate the close of business.

“It has been like this since morning. One was expecting that the banking halls would be busy after a very long Sallah holiday, but I never envisaged it would be this bad. It’s been long I saw something like this,” stated Yusuf, a customer, at the Iyana Ipaja branch of Skye Bank.

“It is as if the bank is not prepared for this type of crowd it is seeing here today. The whole place is filled up and most of the people have been on the queue for hours waiting to either make payment or withdrawal,” he added.

Interestingly, Yusuf was not exaggerating. Others at the branch who spoke to Banking Watch expressed their displeasure at the seeming inability of the bank to promptly attend to their needs.

The situation at Access Bank was not even better. Its banking hall was rowdy while customers struggled for the limited seats available. The crowd at the entrance of First Bank, which is also not far away from Access Bank, was enough to discourage even the steel-hearted. Some of the customers, on sighting the rowdy spectacle quickly beat a retreat.

Curiously, Banking Watch’s tour of other banks on the Abule-Egba –Iyana Ipaja axis, revealed that most of the nation’s financial institutions do not have any mechanism in place for prompt service delivery. The customers are still at the receiving end, going through difficult times in the banking hall, in spite of measures put in place by the regulatory authorities in the sector to ensure quality service.

But why have efforts to decongest the banking halls not been yielding positive results? How best do we decongest our banking halls to enable banks give customers value for their money?

A banker, who would not want his name in print, identified the recent reform in the sector as one of the factors responsible for the ‘crowd in the banking halls today.’ According to him, some customers of some of the rescued banks had switched loyalty from these banks to the more stable ones. This, he argued, had put pressure on the facilities of the banks they had relocated to, “since some of them were not actually prepared for the surge in the number of customers.

“Besides, the banking halls are usually a beehive after a very long weekend, so what we experienced this week is definitely not out of place,” he added.

But a finance expert, Biyi Adesuyi, attributed this to the fact that the country’s economy is cash- based. “There is lack of integrity in our economy, that is why most transactions are cash-based. People do not trust other payment instruments such as cheques and others. For instance, there is a legislation against issuance of dud cheques, but in spite of this you discover that people issue them and go unpunished,” he argued.

“Besides it is also a cultural thing. People always expend what they have on them during festive periods or long holidays and therefore wait for the next working day to go to the bank. Moreover, there are some that have made sales over this period too, who would like to go and deposit it at the bank. The combination of these factors will definitely lead to clutters and commotions in the banking halls,” Adesuyi stated.

He, however, believes this can be addressed by increasing more payment points and employing more tellers or cashiers.

“A management that is proactive should be able to deploy some guest tellers, who are members of staff of the bank but from other departments, on such busy days to decongest the banking halls,” he counselled.

Wise counsel, no doubt. The banking halls are fast becoming a nightmare to the banking public; hence the need for those concerned to begin to imbibe some of these counsels.