Social Distancing Measures, Techniques and Bank Practices During the COVID-19 Era

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on social distancing measures, practices and techniques designed and implemented by banks during the COVID-19 outbreak as well as underline implications and consequences for bank practices in the era following the devastating outbreak. How will banks be able to adapt to practices requiring their employees to work from home during and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak? How will they be accurately able to ascertain and determine those customers considered and categorized as “high risk customers” through the use of information, data techniques and tracing patterns which are used to determine how social or socially vulnerable their customers are? Highly social customers and those designated as being more high risk customers being deemed to have greater contacts with society and therefore more likely to pose greater risks in transmitting or actually contracting the virus.

As well as addressing the above mentioned questions, this paper also aims to highlight the need to balance the need to respect customer privacy as well as the need to protect bank employees. Even though contact details, namely customer telephone and mobile contacts may help to discern the level of social contacts and the class in which to categorize customers – as well as a consideration of tracing techniques which can be deployed to facilitate such a task, thin lines between the need to respect customer privacy and the intrusion of such rights, could exist where appropriate and clear guidelines are not implemented.

In contributing to the literature on the topic, the paper aims to highlight how techniques currently being implemented in advanced economies could be extended to developing countries which may not have adopted such practices and which particularly, may be in need of greater protection since such economies are medically less equipped and not as prepared to deal with the outbreak.

Even though medical facilities by virtue of cost and availability of resources required to acquire and maintain such facilities, may serve as ongoing obstacles in developing countries, knowledge based capital, as well as transferrable knowledge in implementing bank techniques and practices which have been tested and implemented in more advanced or advanced economies, could serve as valuable human and knowledge based capital in averting potential outbreaks or second and subsequent waves.