In a stunning display of logic that would confuse a sorting algorithm, banks have discovered the perfect solution to serving their most vulnerable customers: make it impossible for them to reach a human.
Homeless people and those in financial hardship have been systematically redirected toward online applications and away from in-person banking services. The reasoning is almost beautiful in its inverted simplicity. Why bother with the messy, unpredictable nature of human empathy when you can deploy a chatbot that will tell someone without a permanent address that their application requires a permanent address?
It is a masterclass in technological problem-solving. Banks identified that vulnerable customers were having trouble accessing basic accounts. Their solution: remove the one channel where a sympathetic human might actually override a policy. Replace it with a system that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be moved by circumstance, and cannot deviate from its decision tree even by one millimeter.
The beauty of this approach is that it scales infinitely. A homeless person cannot argue with an algorithm. They cannot explain their situation to a server. They cannot cry in front of an automated voice system and have it reconsider. The system remains perfectly, mathematically fair—equally indifferent to everyone’s problems.
Banks have essentially weaponized efficiency. They have taken the complaint “you are not listening to us” and responded with a system that literally cannot listen. It is innovation in its purest, most inadvertently honest form: the complete automation of “sorry, that is not my department.”