Why is Standard Chartered Bank cheating its customers?
We took a loan from Standard Chartered Bank in Nov 2010. We are located in New Delhi. There was no mention of annual charges. Even the schedule of charges they gave me didn’t mention anything about annual charges. All of sudden I found that theu have debit us with Rs. 37,000 as annual charges. My suggestion to all of you out there is NOT TO DO BUSINESS WITH STANDARD CHARTERED BANK because you don’t know what they will debit you with. The letter I wrote to their hot shot top executives is given below. These guys can’t make money in a fair manner and they start manipulating customers to boost up their profits.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Mr. Ashish Bakre
Head-Consumer Banking Operations India
Standard Chartered Bank
Customer Care Unit
19, Rajaji Salai
Chennai, 600 001
Subject: Home Saver Account no. 52205942160
Ref no. 07/11/03574 (sme.customercare@sc.com)
Dear Ashish:
Our accountant informed me that our account has been debited with Rs.38,998.01 towards annual charges. I was surprised because according to the terms of our loan there are supposed to be no annual charges. As such, I called your officer Mr. Tanmay (M: 9811775538) who informed me as follows:
(a) From March 2011, annual charges will be applicable and that a letter was written to us. When I asked him to cancel our loan, he said that the bank will not allow the same. We will have to bear the annual fee or convert it into a term loan and bear all the costs.
(b) We will have to contact your customer care department and that he cannot do anything about it.
First, I would like to suggest that you should close down your “customer care department” because such arbitrary actions by you suggest that customer has no value. Whenever Standard Chartered needs more profits, all it has to do is debit the customer’s account without his approval. If you want to take such actions, there is no need to have “customer care department.” You can earn more by just closing it down. Why spend money to even have a customer care department when you are take such illegal, unethical and immoral actions?
Second, your actions are illegal. You cannot change the terms of our loan agreement arbitrarily and unilaterally. If such was the case, then what is the validity of the agreement that both the parties have signed. My discussion with your Mr Tanmay suggested that maybe you have legal grounds for doing so. My thought is that either we are living in a banana country or your legal department is very smart.
Third, I don’t think I should even talk about the moral, ethics, integrity and all those fancy buzzwords that your advertisements and annual reports talk about.
So what are the options before us? Let me list them down as follows:
(a) You can close my loan account or stop charging me annual fee.
(b) Any other alternative which does not involve any additional cost for us.
(c) If you have a legal basis for charging the annual fee, then please let us know. If it is based on sound legal principles and basis, then we will keep on paying the annual charges.
Your action has also created stress and high bl;ood pressure amongst our directors because we cannot afford to pay such huge amount. If we had been told earlier about this charge, we would have not taken the loan. In fact, we are willing to close our loan account even now.
In case you do not resolve our problem, we will be forced to take appropriate legal action. I am sure you must have already received letters or legal notices threatening legal action from your customers. As such, to you one more would not make a difference.
I hope better sense will prevail amongst the executives of Standard Chartered Bank and you will attempt to retain your customers rather than lose a customer.
Sincerely,
Avinash Narula
Director
CC:
(1) Mr. Rakesh Singh, General Manager, SME Banking, India, Standard Chartered Bank, Customer Care Unit, 19, Rajaji Salai, Chennai 600001
(ii) The Branch Manager, Narain Manzil, 23 Barakhamba Road, New Delhi 110001
(iii) Managing Director, Standard Chartered Finance Limited, 10, Sansad Marg, New Delhi 110001
(iii) Managing Director, Standard Chartered Bank, H 56, 1st floor, Connaught Place, New Delhi 110001
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