I am a NRI who availed a home loan from HSBC and recently (on 23rd Septemebr 2009) whilst on vacation visited HSBC, Kochi to request early closure of my home loan with the bank by debiting my NRO a/c (into which I had already transferred monies to cover the outstanding). The request was graciously accepted and as a customer advised that it will be actioned within 10 days and should also be expecting a call from HSBC as standard procedure to action closure. Pending this I did receive a call around the 1st October 2009 (I continue to accrue interest still) suggesting a better interest rate if I continued the loan (an anti-attrition call, disguised as a good customer reflection) which I declined and then to my dis-belife I get a letter (by which time I'm back from vacation) advising that I now need to submit/mail them a cheque, wherein, I forecast and compute the accuring interest amount as well from 1st October 2009 till date of clearance.
On calling the help line desk at HSBC to find out what was the reason that my written request wasn't actioned and after going to a maze of questions to authenticate the customer, I was advised that the reason why the letter wasn't actioned was because the signature verification failed. How strange, they accept the request, they call you to dissuade you not to early close and then when they fail in retaining, they claim that they can't action the request because the signature did not match.
I respect regulations and accept need to authenticate but does banking have not longer any space for good customer behaviour and where does then 'KYC' and "CRM" and face to face interactions come into play. What confidence do I have that if I mailed/submitted a cheque as requested, they would action this:-
1) citing signature mismatch again
2) advising that my computed amounts varries from what they compute as on date of action (as I'm in no control of the date when they would receive a cheque I mail from my country of work or when they receive it in their mailroom et all)
or some new creative reason.
Least expect this from HSBC and if this is what they service standards are for customers they classify and tag as PREMIER..
How do I get a fair treatment and feel confident about the banking regulations/environment in India and prevent from such abuse? What recourse to I have in stopping this abuse Was this information helpful? |