Rick Hartnack, a vice chairman of U.S. Bancorp and a Vietnam veteran, tried not to sound too preachy on the subject of banks' mistreatment of military customers.
U.S. Bancorp has kept its nose clean, avoiding the mea culpas and multimillion-dollar settlements that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and others had to offer for improper foreclosures and other abuses of U.S. service members.
"We think our procedures and policies have kept us out of trouble," he said in an interview about the bank's new hotline for military customers. "We checked very carefully. We haven't discovered any [violations]."
Errors are possible. Some customers "don't always tell us everything about their life," said Hartnack, who also oversees small business and consumer lending. Sometimes "we don't know they are in the service. There is always the chance for a one-off mistake."
Still, Hartnack said, he was "dumbfounded" about the lack of common sense some loan officers at other banks showed when troubled borrowers explained that their spouses were fighting overseas.
"Why wouldn't that person talk to their supervisor and say, 'Hey, we can't foreclose on this guy because he's in the middle of a war'? It's hard to foreclose on somebody's house. To do it on somebody in Afghanistan or Iraq is amazing."
Trying to get ahead of the issue, U.S. Bancorp has opened a military service center that service members and their families may call with account questions and financial concerns. Officials said it was a natural extension of the help the bank provides the 1,600 veterans, National Guardsmen and reservists in its work force. When Richard Davis became chief executive in 2006, he promoted hiring of ex-service members and friendly employment policies for veterans and reservists, said Hartnack, a former Marine captain.
