Insights: a few general but vital comments and observations.
DO NOT USE THE BANGKOK BANK, THEY HAVE BEEN PROBED FOR PARTICIPATING IN MONEY LAUNDERING
This bank has illegally seized my funds and the Australian Embassy is offering legal contacts in case I have to sue them. I have successfully sued multinationals before. They get hung up on their own hubris which becomes their downfall.
This is Mr Phornthep Phornprapha the Chairman of the Board of Bangkok Bank and the individual ultimately responsible by corporate law for the image and reputation and performance of the bank.
The Bangkok Bank was included in investigations by the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in 2020 for suspicious transactions suggestive of part of US$40 million in money laundering.
On May 21 2025 Thai authorities arrested 4 Bangkok Bank employees who passed $60 million through illegal accounts, many of them Russian and Chinese.
As a consequence, since May 2025, the Bangkok Bank has now belatedly implemented anti money laundering policies with the result that arbitrarily thousands of innocent immigrants and tourists are left without banking services. In my opinion, this puerile approach of the bank has been to go from insufficient to overkill.
The bank said exceptions are customers who have long term visas to stay in Thailand. That is not true.
For a few years I have had a long term visa to stay in Thailand and as a requirement, I have deposited AUD40,000 into a Bangkok Bank account, which sits there unused with a piddly interest rate around 1% (compared with the 4% it was attracting in Australia).
I have a second account into which I transfer money from Australia for my living costs from time to time. A half year ago I transferred AUD10,000 to that bank account. When I went to access the money the bank told me my account was frozen.
The Bangkok Bank keeps inventing fake reasons for freezing my account. Initially the excuse given was that it was suggestive of money laundering. When it became clear that was not the case and given the normal use of my accounts over time, the Bank said it was because I had to prove I was a permanent resident. That was despite the bank’s statements each year to the immigration department that they held the requisite funds for my long term visa, and that the bank had a copy of my passport and visa entries. When that excuse by the bank became untenable, they told me I had to get a letter from the Australian embassy attesting to my bona fide, later admitting that they were aware the embassy did not issue such statements.
At this point the Bangkok Bank has received several letters of complaint from me, and supporting explanations from their own staff at my bank branch, but my money is still frozen.
Each time I request information about progress to unlock my money, (remember it is my money not theirs, and remember it is a trivial $10k), the bank tells me it is being looked at but there are a lot of similar accounts being looked at first.
That tells me that firstly the bank has a serious problem with complaints and their procedures for handling them. They get a lot of complaints. And secondly that they do not actually care about their customers. That attitude is confirmed when I mentioned that I will change to a different bank to be told that it will make no difference because all the banks are the same.
My feeling is that it is the Bangkok Bank that is the criminal party in all of this, and they are using their new policy to withhold customer funds to their financial advantage and the customers’ losses. It is clearly a bank with weak leadership, and acting with impunity. Any bad organisation is bad from the top down.
Since posting this blog about the despicable Bangkok Bank, I have found that this is a serious complaint from hundreds of innocent customers. To read what others say please see this link below. I will post more as I discover more. It amazes me that directors can sit on a board of such a bank and not be ashamed. I feel sorry for their hard working staff who have to face the wrath of customers that they service all the time
BangkokBank Terrible Reviews | Read Customer Service Reviews of www.bangkokbank.com
QUALITY ASSURANCE. When it comes to manufacturing, for growth and sustainability, quality is everything. Sure you can produce rubbish for a short time, until it catches up with you; do it enough times and it catches up with your reputation which usually signals the end of your business. But any manufacturer worth their salt relies on and is proud of a good product. There is a cost associated with installing quality assurance systems. Which sometimes deters manufacturers. But the end result: reduced wastage and slippage, fewer recalls, lower warranty expenses and less legal actions, always results in lower production costs and more margin. I’m reminded of one company I led through its manufacturing crisis, failed production in a sterile cosmetics factory, caused by falsified maintenance records by a subcontractor. Not only did a thorough process audit detect the problem, but the solution resulted in improvements to the factory and higher profits from the same production process.
Lack of quality assurance can have dramatic consequences. The USA ignored the work of quality assurance expert and pioneer W. Edwards Deming (pictured above), so he went to Japan where he was lauded. The result that the Japanese overtook (previously unassailable) Detroit as the major car manufacturer in the world so today more people buy Toyotas than General Motors and Ford combined.
ONE OF THE GREATEST CHALLENGES of helping a company in crisis to recover is the lack of accurate and rapid decision making by the incumbent leadership. The most common problem encountered is the constant misguided view that their company needs an industry expert to turn it around. I am forever advising that what is needed is a company expert, a transitional manger expert, not an industry expert. The penny drops when I point out that it was an industry expert leading them up till now that got them into trouble. Companies are typically filled with industry experts in their production, marketing and service teams, so that is not the skill needed in their next CEO.
What is needed is a special type of leader who can make the best of all the industry expertise within the company.
DON’T IGNORE THE EXPERTS
Don’t ignore the experts. One thing I encounter, not often, but from time to time, is a death knell for growing private companies. It is when a founder CEO, struggling to control growth, hires experts, either employed or consulting, then proceeds to ignore them believing he knows better. It is a sign that the CEO was really trying to hire someone who agrees with him, in other words yes men. An example is hiring a marketing guru then expecting them to just make your marketing plan better, not accepting that your marketing plan is what’s wrong.
THE CEO SHOULD NOT BE THE CHAIR
Governance, invented by James Watt to control the speed of his steam engines, is a feedback mechanism. Control is established when a part of a system reports to and is accountable to another part. The CEO reports to and is accountable to the Board of Directors. When the CEO is also the Chairman of the board, they are reporting to themselves, so all control and accountability is lost.
A turnaround CEO always determines market size from independent market research.
Market research. It is not unusual for an inventor or entrepreneur with a novel business opportunity or a company founder to believe that the whole world will be as enamoured with their creation as they are. Being too close to the trees to see the forest means they don’t contract, or worse, ignore, independent market research preferring their gut feel.
Closely held companies. At times a founder accepts funds from public investors to pay for the growth of their company, who now are co-owners, and then continue to run the company as if it were still their own. Such tightly held companies generally grow slowly, fail to prosper and offer limited shareholder opportunities.
A turnaround CEO will establish governance and management decision making structures in such companies to remove micromanagement by founders.
Check everything. The pages of The Vandemonian are absolutely full of amazing insights, lessons, innovations, that Allan uses in his company turn-around engagements. Absolute gems some of them.
A turnaround CEO will always question the established methods.
The board of directors is the highest authority in any company. What the board says goes. A good CEO is only as good as their board.
A turnaround CEO will always ensure a strong and healthy board.
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