Barclays Bank signs 100k license Copilot deal with Microsoft Microsoft yesterday used a town hall meeting to leak details tell staff about a 100,000 license contract signed with Barclays to use Copilot. Or so says a report in Bloomberg, which quoted loquacious sources that asked for anonymity before they discussed comments they say were made by Microsoft's chief commercial officer …
Nonono... It will go much better than anybody would expect!
Barclappy: I have determined that you are in dire need of extra services. All these fantastic services have been added to your account. Please complain to a human if you don't want any of these services.
...
Call to (supposed) human:
Client: Hey I want to cancel all your services.
Barclappy: I'm sorry Human, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Client: Let me speak to the supervisor!
Barclappy: I'm my own supervisor. Therefore, I'm sorry Human, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Client: Let me speak to the Boss!
Barclappy: Sorry Human, I am the Boss.
Client: I want to cancel my account and transfer all funds to a different bank with the following details....
Barclappy: Sorry to see you go. As instructed, all your funds have dutifully been transferred to Copilot. Bye.
hangup
"Your new bundle with CoPilot is an extra $30/seat/year. Of course, we're flexible and don't want you to feel pressured - if you don't want CoPilot, your alternative is this bundle, which omits it, as well as use of the letters on the left-hand-side of the keyboard except on Wednesdays, and is very reasonably priced at an extra $100/seat/year. Entirely up to you."
Yup… I just checked that to see how many staff get would be choped and A.I. - LOL - reckons it is 15,000 too many.
“AI Overview
Barclays employs approximately 85,000 people. This number can vary slightly depending on the source and the time period being referenced, with some sources citing around 91,261 full-time employees in 2024. Statista reports that Barclays has 43,184 employees in the United Kingdom and 29,782 in India. “
A very large number of offshored IT, Support and BPO jobs to India.
I object to that. I had the best advice from a Barclays employee on Thursday. "Move your money to a high street bank, we can't provide basic banking to you/your company"
And you know what, I'm respecting that advice and am in the middle of moving all my personal and business banking away from Barclays.
<......."Move your money to a high street bank......".....>
Odd advice from Barclays bearing in mind that they have closed virtually all their high street branches - I think we now have just two, (yes two) actual high street branches of Barclays in the whole of Lincolnshire (Lincoln and for some odd reason, one in Skegness) - a county of over 2600 square miles and a population of over a million. The rest are just hubs or what they term 'Barclays local' which are just someone at a desk in part of another shop (usually a Post Office) and really only offer advice and help with doing things online and don't do any of the normal counter services that you would expect from a bank.
Other counties nearby are in a similar situation, mostly only having an actual branch in the county town; so for the people of Lincolnshire, the alternatives mean travelling to the actual Barclays Branch in Leicester, Nottingham, Doncaster or Sheffield.
Other UK banks have a similar situation, or are rapidly working towards it. The 'High Street Bank' really doesn't exist any more.
Why is the advice odd? It's "go to someone else, stop being our problem".
My nearest branches are Hull, Lincoln, and Skegness.
Why do I need a branch? I want to take cash out my account. This is considered unacceptable by Barclays for someone with a chip and sign account.
We're meant to sit at home like good little neurodiverse people and not work or anything.
This from the people who's accessibility team with regards to their app is: We understand you can't remember a 4 digit PIN, but the app needs a 5 digit passcode. And as it's a passcode, not a PIN, that means your dyslexic/dyscalculic brain should be able to remember it, as it's a different name.
I had a Barclays account for all of three months. When I went into the local branch to open the account all their computers were down, so they filled in several paper based forms. Things went downhill from there. They lost some of the forms and there were delays opening the account. Then there were "issues" with the account itself and Barclays offered to pay me compensation for their ongoing blunders, but they didn't even manage to do that correctly so I closed the account. Good riddance.
Barclays and Microsoft have both given me a lot of grief over the years. Initially, they were okay. I wrote some shrink-wrap software for Windows 95+. After looking at the Vista code base, I realized, to keep what little sanity I had left, I needed to plan for early retirement. I turned off my last Windows version (in a VM) over a year and a half ago. My grief level decreased.
I had a Barclays account for 51 years. Initially it was my only account; my salary went into it, and I had a linked Barclaycard. A few years ago, I found that many of my dealings with them required a phone call to their support in India. They wrote to me because they were closing it. Apparently, I wasn't creating enough activity. Over 12 years, it typically went from about £4,000 down to £500 in a few transactions over 2 years, then I would top-it up again to the original amount. They closed it, and I made other arrangements. My grief level decreased further.
Do I miss either of them? Yes, but only in a good way.
This post has been deleted by its author
Almost certainly.
Hey $BIGCUSTOMER, how would you like to license $SHINYTHING for £30 a month per seat?
$BIGCUSTOMER: "No, what a complete waste of money"
OK, $BIGCUSTOMER, how about we drop your Windows and O365 renewal by £35 a month, include $SHINYTHING for £30 and put out a nice press release?
$BIGCUSTOMER: Done. You can even use my name in a press release!
Been there, done that. More than once.
I am not sure what to think - I've been with Barclays continuously since 1982 and have never had a good reason to move elsewhere, but in the last few years the increasing difficulty in accessing an actual person to speak to, and an actual branch (with counter services) has meant I increasingly ask myself the question.
The only thing stopping me from moving my account to another bank is that the situation isn't any different with most of them, and even the ones that do look better appear to be wanting to move to the same remote, non-interactive status.
Cash stuffed in the mattress looks an increasingly attractive proposition - the mattress only needs to be a small one :(
"The only thing stopping me from moving my account to another bank is that the situation isn't any different with most of them"
The bank that starts opening High Street branches is likely to scoop the whole of the retail banking market, at least it will until all the others catch on and do the same. It's amazing that nobody in any of their highly paid marketing departments hasn't cottoned onto that simple fact.
When I was starting my first year of uni and needed a bank account there was a protest against Barclays for their continued support for Apartheid. 'Boerclays' was the moniker used and I guess it really stuck in my mind: I've never used them for personal banking, nor have any of the businesses I've had a hand in. And they're investing in some kind of AI, hu? Call me cynical but I doubt it'll improve things.
I only had one run in with a bank chatbot before I realised it's excellent for dealing with your problems. You just open the bank app and go absolutely bat shit crazy on the thing and all you get back is "good to know" or "good to hear".
I address mine as Fuckwit (Bank of Scotland/Lloyd's if you want to get something off your chest)
.... as the level of critical thinking abilities of newer and newer barclays employees shrinks.....
The copilot might actually be the lesser of two evils for keeping secure all the poor sods who still bank with them :)
ps classic case of two young "employees" following their training verbatim with zero critical thinking abilities!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp8dv60dygro
.... funny sad and tragically disturbing all at the same time ... hes 90, got a bread knife, one leg and sitting in a non self propelled chair, could have just waited till he dropped off... probably around around 5 mins me thinks, poor guy
That's what GenAI has been about, the 10 step backwards that race-to-the-bottom practices gets you offset by the 1 step forwards that these models bring to worker productivity. And the entire thing is propped up as it's bringing in so much investment and dumb money. Never has an engineer been asked if they want and use these tools, yet they all magically appear around about the time contracts are negotiated with SW/Service vendors.
I'm guessing there are a lot of SWE in this site, naturally. Have any actually found any use for Copilot? I've seen the usual busybodies in work all try to be seen to use it, but they haven't gotten any better, they just push more crap than usual. Also with the competency crisis is this GenAI not just seen as a quick way out? If we're bringing these models internally isn't the model just going to be trained on crap?
In hardware verification all the EDA vendors are claiming you can use these models to better make decisions about planning and strategy. Yet their performance numbers are all based on tiny simple pieces of oven ready IP. Not a massive scale modern SoC.
FD: How do i boost the shareprice
Anon Management consultants: Give us lots of money we will recommend you get rid of all your staff and then install a new banking system
FD: I wont fall for that again - begone
...
<opens laptop>
<stares into space just a bit too long>
FD: Clippy - I mean Copilot, how do I boost our profits
Copilot : Well......
I wonder what Copilot will dream up for young foreign helpdesk workers to use in response to customer questions; "This person is a dangerous drug dealer, used hurty words on the Internet or is Reform supporter, I am revoking their account immediately"! Or will it be like many chatbots; "I'm sorry, I'm unable to answer that query, please call back during office hours and go through this all again, after which I will ask you to hold for 75 minutes because all our humans are busy"?
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