HSBC - Part Two

The automobile financing through HSBC was a bust.

After several more phone calls back and forth with my crest-fallen ejecutivo, who would have loved to have made his December quota of loans, and was prepared to go as far as to remove my mothers maiden name from the six-year-old bank records in order to have the loan application be approved, it became apparent that the loan was not to be.

At one point he even admitted to me that upon filing the paperwork, he 'discovered' that I had been registered as a 'Mexican' and that is why I had been assigned the second last name, just like any normal Mexican national would have. I found this just a little hard to believe and asked him why then did they have a Canadian passport on file as the principal form of identification for this Mexican and was this common, for Mexicans to use foreign passports to identify themselves. He insisted that I was indeed a Mexican in their 'sistema' at which point I mentally closed the HSBC credit application door and decided that either they were completely incompetent or mildly retarded (no offense to anyone suffering from mild retardation).

At the same time, when I sensed that the credit application at HSBC was not going anywhere, I had gone ahead and processed the same information through Scotiabank. (In the interest of fairness, I did inform the HSBC executive of this move) Interestingly, although I was a complete stranger to them, they did NOT require a co-signer for the loan application. Apparently, they did approve the loan, but again, the stumbling block was my mothers' maiden name; and some sort of ID was needed that had that name on it. The salesman at the car lot insisted that it could be anything, even the most absurd little piece of identification since he 'knew' the manager of the bank branch in question and that she knew me and that it would be enough to see the maiden name on something.

Nothing came of this loan application either, but it is notable to compare the attitude and flexibility of Scotiabank, where I have never had an account, to that shown by the trogloditos at the 'world's local bank' where I have banked for six years.

And what about the car, you ask?

Well it turns out that a neighbor was selling one of his cars and lo and behold, the price was right and the amount he was asking fit right into the amount left in my pocket after paying off some debts after the sale of the yellow car!

End of story.