He didn't do anything wrong, the takeaway is that he made Alex a rising star in his bank who was supposed to be giving him 'white glove' treatment but to the Founder it was a just a bank account. Years later he decides to move money to another bank. Alex can't stop it because he has no personal relationship or rapport to lean on. A few years later he encounters some fraud on the account the kind of exact situation that Alex could uniquely help with but Alex had presumably been let go for not giving the white glove treatment and built a rapport to the Founder.
Personally I found the whole thing frustrating to read as it underscores how traditional banks operate 'look after rich people' and 'be indifferent to not rich people'.
> Personally I found the whole thing frustrating to read as it underscores how traditional banks operate 'look after rich people' and 'be indifferent to not rich people'.
Would you expect the fellow who earns the bank $20,000/year and the fellow who earns the bank $200/year to be treated the same?
I also think it’s less about ‘looking after rich people’ as offering the right services to the right customers. Someone who lives paycheque to paycheque and bridges the gap with credit cards and someone who has a few tens of thousands of dollars in cash have different needs; someone who has a few hundreds of thousands has still different ones; someone who has a few millions has yet different ones. Different products make sense to use — and from the bank’s perspective, to offer — at those different points.
Remember, too, that it costs different amounts for the bank to offer different products. Technology can help reduce those costs, which is a good part of how we all have jobs, and a good part of how so many people are so much better off than fifty years ago (back in the day, one had to place orders for 100-share blocks of stock, and pay a broker a commission on it — now it is possible to purchase fractional shares with no commission, enabling anyone with even a few extra bucks to get started compounding returns). But some costs, particularly regulatory costs, cannot be reduced.