Use Citibank, Only in Bangalore
Namma Bangaloor is favored with Citibank’s best operation.
Yeah, that’s where Citibank operates the best.
Matter of fact, Citibank is no more portraying themselves as Bank of ‘Junta’. You can’t open a personal account without a minimum balance of 5 lakhs (I might be wrong, this is the last time I checked almost a year back). Now they only open corporate accounts for the employees of the companies they have dealings with.
Somehow, all the facilities that they offer you suits that “Corporate Banking” image.
Banking with Citibank has been a new experience, when I was coming from standing in queue to get your own money from the bank and be nice with the teller to get your money in the same order in which you stood (I’m talking about Indian Bank).
Bangalore Specific Advantages:
Maximum number of ATMs, and that too in most Key Places.
Suits to the needs of the Techno Geek community who contributes to a major part of Bangalore’s demography. (guess it’s an advantage for the bank)
General Good Things About the Bank
Encourage banking without meeting a bank personnel ever. Definitely makes the back office system very well integrated with the banking process.
Awesome Internet Banking Portal. Even though, at times they have failed in keeping up site integrity or have a stupid & shady third party involvement in keeping up the site.
Issue an ATM Card, which also doubles as a Debit Card. In today’s context when we virtually leave on plastic money, reducing the need of another additional card in wallet (‘wallet’ in my word is ‘perfect pain in the @$$’).
Issuance of Credit Card to the Suvidha Account holder. Makes life easy to have Credit Card and Savings account in the same bank. Integrating both savings account and credit card account, let’s you make the payments online, which is definitely a plus. I hate dropping cheque for paying back credit card statements.
Keeping Utility Payment History, Automatic Payment, online Statements. Account data accessible for 18 months is other additional features.
The online Portal let’s you do many different things. Few of the nice things would be,
Ordering Draft and Couriering the same from Online.
Utility Payments.
Keeping an eye on your other Investments through Citibank.
DEMAT function.
I like the ATM Machine too (even though they fail too often than expected). The fact that it doesn’t eat up my card, it’s a psychological relief about not worrying about the card getting stuck inside the machine. (in US I have had seen people waiting at non-working ATM centers, ‘cause it wouldn’t return their card)
I’m sure I had more to write, but can’t recollect right now. May be will add in my revision of the same review in later date.
Things you’ll miss in Most other Cities
Most other Cities in India are not covered by Citibank’s own ATM Network. Even though the “Cirrus & Maestro” payment gateway would let you use this ATM card in any other ATM tied up with any of these two, the typical user in India likes to use the same Bank’s ATM. I guess if you use other banks ATM, you end up paying some additional service charges too. This is one factor in which I guess “ICICI” & ‘SBI” would very soon turn out as India’s most reachable ATM-Enabled Banks.
A City without Citibank call center operation won’t offer you phone banking at local cost.
In General the ‘Bad Things’ in this Bank
Junta can complaint that, why can’t we also open and use this High Tech banking, without it costing us too much.
Citibank call centers are rather difficult to reach.
The Promotional Calls, Mailers & e-Mails from them are rather annoying. Their CRM system doesn’t seem to have a “This Customer Doesn’t Want Promos” option.
Once they had committed the heinous crime of taking something granted with their credit card holders. They were sent a mailer that, if you don’t come back saying “no”, then you’ll be automatically signed up for some kinda ‘Insurance Package’ from a Citibank partner company & you’ll be regularly billed for it too. Now that’s a punishable crime for a consumer court. Recently Standard Chartered also has done something similar, mail me to know about that :-)
Once they had goofed up my online banking profile with someone else’s e-mail id. They had apologized for the same, but never got back with the actual reason. My guess was a portal design change leading to movement of data from one system to another & missing out on moving data from one system to another.
Can’t think of more stuff right now J, will add up later, if I can think of something.