This is perhaps the only bank in the (civilised) world that does not have a Net Banking for its credit cards. Mind you, HDFC was one of the pioneers in Net Banking for their Savings accounts. Guess they stopped at that.
While every tom, dick and harry bank in india claims to provide net banking for their credit cards, HDFC would not give you even proper PHONEBANKING. You have to dial these chaps and go to an operator and prove your credentials before you can get the details. of course, if am a (un)trusted colleague who can see your statement and know your bday, I can access your account and ask them to pay my credit card bills.
Am currently in the US and it is most frustrating when I run around to buy a calling card to call my family and end up spending half of it while being put on hold by the HDFC bank system.
Even to the Netbanking, some of the features like Money transfer to non-hdfc accounts are not available.
Have a feeling that 3 years back a set of folks did a hell of a nice job for that point in time and nobody has even looked at the Netbanking after that.
Why am I holding on to them after all this?? Of course, the same reason as any other sane person, they have my SALARY account.. PITA, that’s what they are.. I have used ICICI Bank and their service esp on the net is exceptional.
And in the end of it all, I still don’t know how much I was billed for my call home from Amsterdam.
Hope these guys wake up before more people get frustrated at their service levels and start pelting them.
UPDATE - 23-Apr-2005
OK its been 7 months since I wrote this review and so I thought it was necessary to give an update so that this review is fair and square.. My job is quite simple since nothing much has changed.
However, to HDFC’s credit, there is a work around by which you can know the balance credit in your account. On the HDFC Bank home page, register yourself for ENet Safebanking. This is a neat facility that would let you generate new credit card numbers with preset spending limits. You can read more about the benefits when you get there. But the usefulness of this facility is that the page always shows your primary card account’s balance credit. That is one way of knowing how much credit you have left in your account.
Of course, there is one more option. If you go to the Customer Service (or was it ’’Help’’) link, they have a pre-filled list of common questions that you can pose to them. One of these is ’’WHAT IS MY CURRENT CREDIT BALANCE?’’ or something like that. So I tried that and Zilch.. maybe its just me but have a gut feel that no one actually saw my request.
So as of this day, the situation remains as it was a few years and a few months ago.. so i’ll close with the same line that the Call Center chaps give me when I ask about Netbanking - ’’We are working on it saar’’.
13-Dec-2005 - Called them up yday and still the same answer..
06-Feb-2006 - Hurrahhhh!!! Some action at last... If you have a Netbanking account with hdfc for your savings bank account, then you can add your credit card to the account. What you get is a screen that details the very very very very basic details of your card account including your last billed amount and the remaining credit limit. There is not much information above that. No statements online or detailed transactions. While it is nice that HDFC has at least moved its backside a little, there is still a long way to go.
27-Mar-06 - Great News!!! The netbanking has been enhanced to offer details like Last Statement, Unbilled Transactions etc. Have not had the time to fully explore the facilities but would like to say that the progress is impressive. Am upgrading the recommendation and changing some of the cons.