IT referred more to secure investment than material goods, but the term used to be ‘safe as houses’. That hasn’t been the case for many years now in urban Pakistan. Forget people hiding away savings and jewellery under the mattress, more and more people are growing chary of keeping even valuable documents in the house for fear of being robbed.

Fortunately, the solution is easy: simply rent a locker from a bank.

Or, at least, that is what I’d thought. Until last weekend, when an eight-hour heist at a lockers facility associated with a private bank in Karachi left over 50 strongboxes stripped of their contents and, worse, the owners with no readily apparent avenue of recompense.

It is common practice for the contents of goods put in bank lockers to remain undeclared and unvalued. You can put whatever you like in there, and you don’t have to tell the bank what it is (although you may separately have bought insurance according to the item’s value).

For that reason, what banks offer against the contents of the lockers is generally flat rates of insurance, often related to the size of the box you have rented. This is the sum that the bank will pay to you in case the contents of your locker are damaged, destroyed or lost. While it may not reflect the value of the goods in question, that is the sum contracted between the bank and the individual renting out a locker facility.

The State Bank of Pakistan has laid-out rates of insurance against the contents of lockers that apply to all banks across the board.

So, at least in theory, those rules could have applied to the victims of Karachi’s Soldier Bazaar heist. Turns out, there was a technicality: the locker facility in question was apparently not being run directly by the bank but by an employees’ organisation subsidiary to it.

That meant, from the reports in the press, first that the police didn’t have to treat the case as a bank robbery at all but could register it as just an ordinary theft — which would put it lower down on the priority list. And, secondly, it meant that the SBP’s rules about insurance don’t apply.

And that means that the people whose possessions were looted have pretty much been left high and dry.

So far, the bank and the organisation that ran the lockers facility have expressed great regret and it has been announced that the victims will be compensated; but no clarity has emerged at all how compensation will be calculated. To my mind, this will be a difficult task since the only way of estimating the value of the contents of a particular locker will be to take the owner at his word.

Most likely, the victims will end up having to take whatever they’re eventually offered.

As one of the great numbers of people who have similarly rented a locker in a bank, this makes me feel very insecure. Was it made clear to the people who were renting strongboxes at this facility that it was not in fact run by the bank at all but its subsidiary, and the difference this would make in the case the worst happened?

These sorts of things usually end up being in very fine print, and while of course it was the renters’ responsibility to have ascertained the facts of the matter, certainly this particular question would never have occurred to me. Surely, the banking sector needs to better publicise these sorts of details given their relevance.

Secondly, don’t banks and their regulators start needing to take security much more seriously?

There have been 10 bank robberies in Karachi this year alone, and they seem to be getting more and more brazen. The money can be going anywhere from financing terrorism to plumping up the coffers of criminals.

In this locker facility’s case, there was only one guard on the premises and the CCTV system was out of order. Here again, there are set standard operating procedures and minimum security requirements. But many banks and branches slip up by failing to adhere to them stringently.

As was pointed out to me, why is it that one never hears of a foreign bank being looted? Because they follow protocol.

Several other loopholes in banks’ security can easily be discerned, not the least of them being under-trained or ill-equipped guards, or even the possible collusion of insiders. But surely, the growing numbers of bank heists bode ill. Why aren’t we seeing any movement on the issue, or any sign that someone in authority has even noticed?

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com