I want to let off some steam here on the current SBI strike. I have my home loan through SBI while I do all my regular banking through ICICI. For all their wrinkles, there is one thing about ICICI that I like the most - the ability to transfer money to any bank account in India electronically for free. Most other banks hit you with charges in one form or another but ICICI is a true blue customer friendly service for free. So anyway, coming back to my rant, I have scheduled my home loan payment from my ICICI to my SBI loan account to automatically happen on the first of the month. This month, the scheduled transfer was rejected by SBI. This is an EFT (electronic fund transfer) that is routed via RBI to a computer system within SBI. I would imagine that there is really no manual operation involved here since a bank that is as large as SBI cannot possibly be doing this manually.
So who decided to shut down the automated computer systems that process these transactions? What if this was not a home loan but a financial payment to pay a college tution or a payment for a hospitalization service ie. a critical need for the customer? Why did they decide to play Gods? I suppose such things are not a big deal for them anyway. They are after all a publicly traded company and they have shareholders who can be taken for a ride while they are busy messing with their customer's money.
Morale of the story - Private banks will potentially run away with your money while the nationalized ones will simply sit on it and torment you. So dont keep all your eggs in one basket.
Amen!
5 comments:
Hi,
I stopped using Public sector banks long time ago. When my salary account moved to HDFC bank from SBI, i closed my account with them. When i went to close my account, the guy at the counter was extremly rude and when he asked me the reason for closing the account, i told him that i get much better service else where and i hate people being rude to the customers.
Public sector bank employee still knows that whatever happens, he/she will not lose his job. That is the core issue.
Regards,
Prasanth
Hi, Looks like you stopped updating your blog... I find your blog interesting... please revive it
- K
http://greenbuck.blogspot.com
After reading your blog, I called ICICI guys to open 3 in 1 a/c.But the chap sat on my papers for 3 weeks and later on demanded hefty amount to open the s.b a/c. I said bingo and opened my /c with a nearest nationalised bank
I actually found Credit Card Offers to be a pretty useful resource on credit card data in India. HDFC bank seems to be doing well.
I suppose your transaction was hit by some error. They won't really 'shut it down'. If they do hundreds (if not thousands) of transactions would fail. This is the typical scenario where some techie sitting in some IT dept./co. pushes the transaction along on it's way.... Trust me I know people who do this for a living (not that they like doing it) :)
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