Callum Macdonald » personal loan sales http://www.callum-macdonald.com Callum on life Sun, 05 Feb 2012 09:01:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Smile: debt pimps http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/12/08/smile-debt-pimps/ http://www.callum-macdonald.com/2008/12/08/smile-debt-pimps/#comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:31:41 +0000 Callum http://www.callum-macdonald.com/?p=794 Continue reading →]]> I called my bank today to dispute a transaction. After dealing with that, the representative asked me how many times I log onto the smile web site per week. Then he said that I had been pre-approved for a loan of up to £14’000. I told him in no uncertain terms that consumer credit is like crack cocaine and I had no intentions of returning to my previous crack addict ways.

Smile and the Co-operative are billed as the “ethical bank”. They have an annual ethics survey which I recently completed. It asks questions about what type of businesses they should invest in, and what they should avoid investing in. Arms dealers, polluters, child labourer exploiters and so on are not eligible for funding by the coop bank.

Yet the survey made no mention of ethical practice with their consumers, their customers, their members in fact. I’m disappointed by the relatively “hard sell” tactics I experienced from Smile today. I expected better from an ethical bank.

The “most relevant” CC licensed picture on flickr.com for the search smile:

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