[Resolved]  ICICI Bank Limited — cheating on foreign currency exchange rate

Address:

Bangalore, Karnataka

Recently, I did a transfer on 13, 000 US dollars to my India ICICI bank account. I simply chose ICICI because it has been my primary bank account for ten years and I trusted the indicative exchange rate that was put up on their website. The transaction was initiated on May 12th and after a lot of email exchange with ICICI (they needed some clarifications regarding purpose of remittance and were totally dragging it), it was credited on May 29th 2015. During this period the actual exchange rate was consistently above 63.5 and topped upto 64.12. The indicative exchange rate shown in ICICI website has also been greater than 63 during this period, and infact it is stated in the ICICI page that the exchange rate is confirmed for USA. But the exchange rate that has been provided on my transaction is 62.33, which is much lesser. This has resulted in a loss of more than Rs. 10, 000 to my transaction. I sent them a mail regarding my concern and received a standard reply. "We would want to clarify that the transactions are processed in batches (depending upon the country- currency combinations) through application driven timely procedures and therefore we do not speculate on the FX rate and time of conversion of funds. We wish to inform you that for every transaction submitted through our wire transfer channel, ICICI Bank carries out the conversion of foreign currency to Indian Rupees on receipt of clear funds in our foreign currency account, and applies the foreign exchange conversion rates prevailing at the time of conversion of funds." Only after the transaction did I do a google search and found that ICICI was doing this kind of cheating with all customers.