One small businessman told The National this week that he planned to start banking with his mattress after being given four weeks notice to close his account by Standard Chartered.
It follows the bank's decision to wind up thousands of small and medium enterprise (SME) accounts in the UAE, provoking fury among customers.
The businessman may have been speaking figuratively but he has a point. In an era of historically low interest rates and historically high bank fees, mattresses have much to offer the small, medium and king-sized enterprise.
Here are the top ten reasons you should consider opening an account with one: At least sleep on it.
1) If you are unhappy with the level of customer service offered by your mattress you can jump up and down on it repeatedly until it submits. When you want to close your account with it you can ship it off to the nearest landfill site or donate it to a bedless tramp of your choosing. Doing the same to your personal banker, while rewarding in the short term, could cause offence and ultimately result in criminal prosecution.
2) When you call 800-Mattress customer service, your bed will not offer you automated responses in English, Hindi and Arabic to almost every question other than the one you want to ask. Like your bank, it cannot really help you. Unlike your bank, it doesn’t pretend it can.
3) Your mattress will not use your hard-earned savings to buy collateralised debt obligations secured by assets that probably include your old mattress that you thought you’d got rid off when you gave it to that bedless tramp. Bet you didn’t see that coming.
4) With the exception of mattresses from Iran and North Korea, bedding is not yet within the jurisdiction of US anti-money laundering rules and so large or irregular transfers to it do not attract regulatory scrutiny and are also happily tax-exempt.
5) If you take your mattress overseas it will not suddenly prevent local ATMs from dispensing cash to you because it’s worried something fishy may be going on. If you have ever landed at Peshawar Airport at 3am with only a packet of polo mints in your pocket and a non-functioning credit card named after some rare metal or other, you will know that in such a situation your mattress will be a better friend to you than your bank.
6) For younger savers seeking the best overnight deposit rates for their recently detached baby teeth, pillows and mattresses offer a rate of return that the banking industry has never really challenged.
7) Banks give customers sleepless nights. Mattresses give customers a good night’s sleep.
8) With most banks offering saving account interest rates that are considerably less than the rate of inflation, mattresses offer broadly the same returns but without the additional account charges.
9) Your mattress will not lecture you about the need for financial literacy and adequate retirement provisioning while simultaneously pushing credit cards on you with interest rates of circa 35 per cent APR designed to condemn you to a lifelong sentence of misery and debt servitude. But you do get a card with a picture of your favourite football team, so not all bad.
10) That’s all well and good, you say. But will my mattress give me a loan to help my business grow, recruit more staff and contribute to the diversification of the country and the greater economic good? Well, no. But then again, if you’re an SME, neither will your bank.
scronin@thenational.ae
