A Different View with Dave O’Connell

It was a banking relationship incentivised by the offer of a what we used to call a free boogie box – or a portable radio/cassette recorder, to be precise. Even that was actually acquired under slightly dubious circumstances, because this was an inducement to attract new student accounts – and I’d already well finished college.

But because this is now way past the statute of limitations, it’s okay to say that the brother – and a bank clerk – put me down as a student, and the radio/cassette player was duly collected in return for a signature on a new student deposit account with AIB.

The initial advantage was mine, but in the 40 years since then, AIB will possibly also see this as an investment that paid off, even if I’m not exactly the type of customer on whose business transactions the annual banking bonuses are based.

And yet small fry though I may be, the bank has been my only port of call for five mortgages, a series of car loans, house insurance, life insurance, savings accounts, credit cards, debit cards…the whole gamut of banking services, all carried out under one roof.

My unswerving loyalty not a reflection on the bank’s service one way or the other. It’s down to abject laziness on my part for never once, over those four decades, checking if there was a better place to put my money or to look for my loans.

There was one point, as we were enjoying the rollercoaster of the Celtic Tiger, when I was offered an MBNA credit card in the post – no real credit check, no commitment to offer up the first born on failing to meet repayment. It just dropped in through the letter box as though it was a flyer from a handyman.

But neither the card nor the service lasted, and the Banklink was quickly back in business.

These days, I’ve a Revolut card just because it was easy to acquire and it’s handy for sending money for birthdays and Christmas to the younger generation who all have one – but frankly, because anything that goes into Revolut must stay in Revolut, it’s a fall-back rather than a frontline facility.

So, having started out collecting post office stamps as a saving mechanism and then transferring to AIB as I started working, I’ve been banking in the same place ever since.