For many years, keeping money safe seemed like a simple,
straightforward matter. Other than during times of recession, confidence in
banks remained relatively high. After the recent issue involving a Union Bank
employee who was arrested for allegedly stealing P17M from their Pasig City branch.
I’m pretty sure a skeptical minority would have preferred to keep their cash
hidden at their home rather than risk their savings account in banks. But if
you ask me, I’d still rely and trust on banks for both my savings and checking
needs. After all, UnionBank was able to learn about the said incident by means
of its regular routine checking. The culprit was quickly arrested and was filed
with the corresponding charges. Banks are huge, complex and dynamic systems that
manage huge volumes of cash in real time. The fact that incidents such as this
are not everyday occurrences, is actually a testament to how robust and fault
tolerant Unionbank's electronic safeguards are.
Banks will always be the targets of thieves, but I
would rather have my money be in a bank than the thieves to have my home as
their target. At least a bank has layers of redundant security, and
expertise and then finally insurance. 17 million pesos sitting in a home
safe or anywhere other than in a bank would be enough to make anyone lose
sleep, worse than that, if it were to somehow be robbed, there would be no
getting it back, and people are liable to get hurt or killed when it is taken.
Why do I still trust my bank [Union Bank, in particular]? First of all, what I had mentioned above wasn’t
exactly an isolated case for prior to that two other well-known banks went
through scrutiny following a 2-day outage. Importantly, the said incident is
not in any way involved with cybercrime or cyber security. Unionbank on its own conducted a rigorous
internal probe to know the extent of the said issue.
