I understand the perspective of the paranoid bank exec! But if the alternative is that their customers are trained to give out personal information whenever someone calls and says they're from the bank, that's quite possibly worse.

It would be nice if when someone called me from an institution, they gave me a code that I could enter after calling the number on the back of my card. That way I would have confidence I'm talking to the bank and would feel comfortable giving out verification information.

In the past, it has always been a headache to find my way back to the department that called me.