Penned Thoughts

I wanted to transfer Rs. 1,340 to an ICICI Bank account today and, even with three bank accounts to my name, a couple of debit cards, and a credit card, couldn’t do it. Now, I’ll state it upright—I had lost the cheque book and ATM PIN for one of the banks, so I was slightly at fault as well. But it’s 2009, folks; there ought to be a way for someone to send some cash over to someone else instantly if they have three bank accounts and Internet banking enabled on two of them.

IndusInd Bank

Don’t even get me started on this one. The less said about it, the better. Do you know how you register for Internet banking with IndusInd Bank? When you sign up for an account, the application form doesn’t allow you to simply fill a checkbox to enable the service, as you might expect. Instead, you have to sign up for a savings account and go home.

Once your account is activated and functional, which may take up to a fortnight, you need to physically present yourself at the bank once again and fill out a form to enable Internet banking. Once that is out of the way, you can go back to your house and wait. In another couple of weeks, if you’re lucky, you’ll receive another form via courier that you’ll have to fill and deposit at the bank.

After another week of waiting, Internet banking will be activated and ready for you to use. Or so I’m told. I don’t have the patience to actually go through the tedious process of visiting the bank thrice and waiting for more than a month to get the darned thing working so I didn’t get it activated at all. So this one was pretty much dead in the water.

Axis Bank

Axis Bank made it pretty simple to activate online banking. While signing up for an account, you can just select the option to have it enabled and you receive the username and password by post in a week or two. No need to visit the bank more than once. I also have a gold debit card and cheque book, so I was covered from all angles. Sounds like it would be easy to do a transaction, right?

Yeah, sure! And pigeons will fly.

…Wait, what?

Oh, never mind. The point is that it isn’t. It turns out that Axis Bank disables your online fund transfer privileges if you do not use the facility for three months in a row. You know, so that if someone gains unauthorised access to your account, they cannot wire all the money to a secret underground bank in Kashmir and run with the loot.

It sounds like an inspired idea in theory but is horrible in practice. Here’s an idea, Axis Bank—why don’t you just let me take care of my account’s security? Surely, if I can be trusted to own a bank account and transfer money to and from it, I can be given the liberty to take care of my passwords?

Axis Bank does give you the option to sign up for a service called NETSECURE, which will ensure that your fund transfer privileges are never revoked. But it costs money. It’s a small sum—Rs. 150 per annum—but why should I have to pay a yearly fee just to keep the bank from cordoning off my banking facilities? It’s ridiculous.

To add insult to injury, the bank doesn’t offer 24/7 telephone support, so at 9:00 PM in the night, I had no way to talk to an actual, live person and try to resolve my problem. In the end, I didn’t get to use Axis Bank to make the transfer either. Two down, one to go.

ICICI Bank

This is the one I had the highest hopes for but it ended up disappointing me as well. When it comes to advancement and ease of use, ICICI Bank is definitely the best of the three banks I have accounts in. Internet banking was easy to set up and so was getting a debit and instant credit card (although neither card had my name embossed on it, which is a bummer).

Since I haven’t ever had to use the ATM facilities of ICICI Bank, I never realised that I’d lost the PIN for my debit card. But that shouldn’t be a problem when I have online banking at my disposal, right? Well, it wouldn’t, if only the bank could stop being so freaking paranoid about security and making life difficult for its own customers.

When I tried to do a fund transfer, the net banking portal asked me to register a payee. Apparently, this ensures that it’s the genuine you who’s trying to send money across to some other account. I entered the account number and other details and hit return. At this point, it told me that they didn’t have my mobile number on record, which was essential for payee registration.

By golly, I swear I’d written my mobile number on every form I’d filled out during the initial registration and had even signed into the Internet banking portal and entered it in the relevant field on the contact details form online. Heck, they even send me instant text message updates whenever there is any activity on my account! How do they manage to do that if they don’t even know my number?

Anyway, I just entered my mobile number and received a confirmation message that it had been successfully registered. So far, so good. I then entered the payee registration details again and it showed me a dialog box with a really complicated message (full of double negatives) that said that I would only be able to do this three days after making any changes to my mobile number. Which I’d only had to do because their stupid system didn’t realise that it already had my mobile number.

I called ICICI Bank’s 24/7 telebanking number and was presented with the most messed up IVR system I’ve ever had to contend with. Honestly, it had layers upon layers of options and menus, when all I’d wanted was “press ‘9’ to talk to a customer care executive.” The amount of information I spent ten minutes entering via key presses could’ve easily been conveyed to an actual person in twenty seconds flat.

Anyway, the guy on the other end told me that he could register the payee from his end but it would require me to know my debit card number and PIN. When I told him I’d lost the latter, he told me I could have it reset instantly by disconnecting the call, placing it again, and choosing a different set of options.

I did that, spending only eight minutes with the IVR this time (hey, practice makes a man perfect), and was eventually talking to another guy. He started asking me all sorts of questions (birthdate, account number, mother’s maiden name, nominee name, etc.), which I understand is important for security, in order to confirm it was really me.

After I’d answered all questions to the best of my ability, I was told, in no uncertain terms, that I didn’t appear to be Aayush Arya. He told me to go visit my local branch (which, of course, had closed by now), produce a photo identity to prove that I was really who I claimed I was (this guy named Aayush Arya, from the looks of it), and request for a PIN change, which would take a week or more.

Great! Back to square one.

Conclusion

As you might imagine, by the end of all this, I still hadn’t managed to transact a single paisa across to the other account and was fuming with rage. What is the point of all this advancement when, at the end of the day, doing a simple thing such as a fund transfer requires you to jump all sorts of hoops?

As a point of reference, when I was in the USA, all I’d needed to do to make a bank account is present myself at a branch of Bank of America (which was basically on the ground floor of the building I was residing in), show them my passport, and fill out a simple form.

That’s it. My account was opened right on the spot, I was handed an already activated debit card and asked to choose my own PIN, and an online banking account was created for me by the BoA representative himself (once I’d entered a password of my choosing, of course). And I was a nineteen-year-old student all the way from India who had arrived in the country just one day ago and planned to stay for only a month.

I can understand that major developments like improved roads and traffic, better housing, more widespread education, eradication of terrorism, etc. cannot happen overnight, but what’s stopping Indian companies from adopting the virtue of customer care? Why can’t they work to make your life easier instead of erecting all kinds of barriers in your way as you go about trying to accomplish even the most mundane of tasks?

This post was about banking institutions only but if I were to write something about the broadband service providers in India or e-commerce websites or the railways, for that matter, those posts would read pretty similarly as well. That’s not to say there aren’t great service sectors in India—the telecom and aviation industries come to mind—but they are few and far between.

As for my banking problem, well, I’ll just have to go in tomorrow and do it the hard way. I’ll have to withdraw the money from an ATM and then deposit the cash at my local ICICI Bank branch. Hopefully, it will go smoothly this time. As soon as I reach Noida on 2 Aug, I plan to open a CitiBank account pronto. It’s an American bank, so, hopefully, it will have its priorities straight.

Aayush