www.atb.com This web space is frightfully average and typical of financial groups and banks. It’s fairly easy to get around and find what I’m looking for but I can’t see that it’s very helpful—which is also typical of banking pages. If I’m looking for corporate business banking solutions than it doesn’t really provide the information I’m looking for, nothing I imagine corporations seeking the right bank might be interested in. In essence it’s really just another advert. Don’t we see enough advertisements promising excellence—what we need, as consumers is more detailed information at our fingertips. As a personal banker I want more than an empty promise of ‘worry-free internet Banking’. Every bank on the web makes this claim. And every single one is the same. People choose banks because it’s convenient: location, limited choice, and logistics—chances are the dominant industry in the area, in Alberta, banks with ATB, and workers are involuntary linked to ATB thru direct deposit or other company deals. What options do they have? Where else will these predominantly under-educated oil workers and farmers go? I want brutal honesty—their slogan should be something like: ‘You don’t have a choice anyway.’

The thing that irritates me the most about this financial group website is that they are essentially a fossil fuel derivatives bank, and most of their personal bankers are probably either farmers or shale oil workers or some other form of dirty oil energy—that is the Alberta economy in a nutshell. And yet they boast clean energy in their masthead with an eco-friendly symbiotic image of clean energy and nature with swaying wheat and a farm of windmills so my first impression is that ATB is a bank concerned with the environment and a big investor in renewable energy and wind energy especially. But nowhere on this site do I find anything related to clean energy. The derivatives offered and stressed are in oil. There is no claim that they are encouraging wind energy with investments—even British Petroleum makes that claim. So, the mast head is a complete lie, and has absolutely nothing to do with the interests of ATB. That turns me off, and for that reason I would never consider this bank. Institutions like this preserve and maintain a destructive economy. They might claim Alberta infrastructure is based on oil and agriculture, and so that these are the people and institutions they serve but it takes financial institutions to underpin change. And it seems to me that Alberta‘s economy is ripe for transition into renewables—such as wind farms that would go hand in hand with agriculture. ATb could pump investments into wind energy and actively promote clean energy. The Alberta economy could easily transcend into wind power—shifting the bulk of jobs from dirty unhealthy oil refineries and shale mining to wind, and organic agriculture, and other clean energy derivatives, and eco-friendly businesses, such as green-roofing.

The web site is relatively convenient but average and boring and dishonest.