What Chase Shredding My Wife’s Passport Says About the State of Financial Services Today
By: Adam Nelson (Partner at FirstMark)
After a terrible customer experience, some people vent by yelling in person. Others will tag corporate accounts and yell into the Twitterverse. While I considered both, the VC in me decided to write this thoughtboi piece instead.
Why?
Because this isn’t just a story about one frustrating experience — it’s a case study in how outdated systems and rigid processes at legacy financial institutions create a massive gap in customer experience that fintech has the potential to address. The passport shredding wasn’t a one-off blunder; it was a symptom of a structural weakness.
We always say we’re in the early innings of fintech, but my friend and great fintech investor Rex put this into helpful perspective recently:
So we’re not even in the early innings yet…we are in the first at bat. Legacy financial services are sticky and stubborn, despite being riddled with systemic disadvantages. Case in point: despite being a fintech investor, I’ve remained a loyal Chase customer for 31 years. But after this experience, I’m wondering if loyalty is just Stockholm Syndrome with better branding.
Frankenstein’s IT Monster
Earlier this year, my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly. On top of the emotional toll, we found ourselves navigating the endless bureaucratic nightmare of unwinding his financial affairs.
Chase wasn’t high on my list of places to expect headaches. I’ve been a happy customer with responsive banking contacts since 1993. But this was the kind of edge case that exposes every flaw in a legacy system.
Despite having all the necessary documents and already opening an estate account, we were told we’d need to visit a branch in person to close his account. Why? Because his account predated modern systems and was likely still tethered to a legacy banking core that didn’t play well with newer platforms.
Not surprisingly, when you have to support a patchwork of legacy systems, even the staggering $17 billion Chase spends on R&D can’t bridge the gaps. The result is a Frankenstein’s monster of IT — systems cobbled together that can’t even provide basic customer functionality like unifying data across platforms. The same disconnected systems that made closing an account unnecessarily painful also set the stage for an even more absurd failure — a shredded passport that Chase couldn’t connect to our accounts, despite having all the necessary data.
The Passport Fiasco
After spending 45 minutes closing the account at our local Chase branch — a surreal, The Office-like experience — we left, relieved to have it behind us. Then, days later, my wife realized she had forgotten her passport.
We retraced our steps and returned to check at the branch, even though we assumed that of course they would have called us if they had found it. “Worry not,” our banker reassured us — the passport was there and safe, so we went to retrieve it. “I’m so glad you came back!” he exclaimed as we looked at him puzzled wondering why he didn’t just call. A few minutes later, he returned empty-handed. “Let me have my manager check the vault,” he said, leaving us in suspense.
Finally, the manager emerged and delivered the gut punch: “I guess we must have shredded it.”
Shredded. My wife’s identity — tied to a document with her full name, the same name linked to her Chase accounts — was destroyed without a second of pause. Chase’s brittle architecture couldn’t connect basic dots: that the name on the passport matched an account with our address and phone number, And, even though they had our address on file (less than 1,000 feet away), apparently, “protocol” didn’t allow for any notification or intervention.
This wasn’t just bad customer service. It was a perfect storm of structural failures:
- Disconnected Systems
Chase had all the data to connect the dots — my wife’s name, her account, her address — but their legacy architecture couldn’t support the logic required to act on it or even any interaction that wouldn’t require us to enter via a bank branch. - Rigid Protocols That Ignore Human Needs
Even when the bank had opportunities to prevent the problem — by notifying us or preserving the passport — they defaulted to a system designed to enforce rigid rules and act like deterministic software to fill in the technological gap, rather than let humans excel where computers can’t yet: empathy and judgment - Indifferent Staff with No Agency
The branch staff weren’t empowered to solve the problem. It wasn’t just that morale was low, and they seemed resigned to the rigidity of their processes. This had clearly fallen through the cracks with no one taking responsibility for a customer outcome, in part because they’re too busy bridging gaps in the system that require human intervention.
No one at Chase — not a banker, a manager, or the system itself — was equipped to intervene in something that should be so routine as a customer leaving behind an ID.
Empathetic Product Design > Branch Lollipops
Here’s the irony: empathy isn’t just missing from the front lines of financial services (as evidenced by the most recent Yelp results of Chase’s dense NY footprint), it’s missing from their product design because their fragmented, legacy infrastructure generates edge cases like ours daily, creating tangible harm for customers. It’s not lost on me how lucky we are that this is merely an insult not a true injury for our family, while I know that the limits of the financial system are hitting real folks in need.
Bank branches are like public restrooms. You’re glad they’re there when you need them, but they’re not somewhere you ever want to go.
Fintech has an enormous advantage here: it can embed empathy into scalable, digital-first architectures. Good system design ensures customers are treated as individuals, not edge cases. Strong product design bridges gaps between data silos and automates the kind of proactive, personalized service that legacy banks fail to provide. It’s not about putting a human in every interaction; it’s about building systems that don’t need to be human to be humane and then have escalation to an employee who has agency and latitude to fix problems.
Getting Beyond the first at-bat in Fintech
This of course isn’t just about one bad experience with Chase. The truth is that Chase is one of the most tech-forward of the legacy banks and is likely going to be the last incumbent to bleed customers to emerging players (and for some reason as of this writing I’m still a customer!) This is, instead, an illustration on the state of financial services as a whole. Legacy institutions are too big to fail, but they’re not too big to outcompete.
As VCs, founders, and consumers, we have a role to play to usher in the disruption and get fintech penetration out of a very long first inning. We need to back those building better systems and exploit the structural advantages of challengers:
- Digital-First Architectures: Free from the baggage of legacy systems, they can adapt to customer needs in real time.
- Proactive Service: With integrated data, they can act before a problem becomes a crisis.
- Customer-Centric Culture: Empathy isn’t an afterthought — it’s baked into the product from day one.
The opportunity is massive, but it starts with demanding more — because the status quo isn’t good enough.
And for those of you wondering, my wife’s appointment for a new passport is already in process. When the customer experience at USPS seems like an upgrade you know you still have a long way to go!
