I have received a letter on 24-Jan-2013; once again Citibank has converted all of the “suvidha” savings account to “citibanking” account type, and have now bluntly instructed their existing customers to maintain a monthly minimum commitment of Rs.100, 000/- and for new customers Rs.200, 000/-. There is a penalty charge of Rs.500/- for each time if the bank account balance will go below Rs.100, 000. This means that Citibank is expecting to grow their funds straight 4 folds by imposing such exorbitant conditions, and they have done the same about 2 years back by increasing the limit by almost 2 folds.
I personally think that this is an end to this arrogant behavior, with no care for customers. This is a greedy bank and only wants to retain the “affluent” customers or salary accounts. Citibank has minimum number of branches in comparison to the other available banks; the only good thing about them is their smart banking solutions, whereby the Indian banks still lacks such service due to some of their conservative ‘not so easy’ banking techniques, like ICICI bank website looks like a cheap 1$ shop and HDFC still takes ages to add a new beneficiary account number and jigsaw conditions to set even a simple password. But everything has got its price, and Citibank’s price is now definitely not worth-it.
I live at Delhi NCR, and a year back Citibank closed all its branches on one fine day at Noida and never cared to even inform the impacted customers. I missed applying in one residential housing scheme of HUDA, as I counted upon their super expensive service (4.5% interest p.a on account and Rs. 25000/- minimum balance previously) and found at last moment that there is no physical branch available to get a demand draft. The customer advisor suggested me to visit the ’near by’ nehru place, Delhi branch (30 kms on both sides) as the only available solution.
Rs100, 000 minimum balance commitment for this sort of careless no care for customer bloody bewkoof banao attitude !