ICICI is fast turning into a bit of a leech like its other ’foreign’ counterparts that will rip you off even before you’ve finished batting the proverbial eyelid. They don’t bother to inform you that your quarterly average balance is a few rupees below the minimum and then slap you with an 800-rupee penalty for letting it dip! Now that’s a real con job if I ever saw one.
We have a rarely-used account that had just enough cash around the minimum Rs 5000 balance levels. Since we don’t really keep track of it, it so happened that last quarter the quarterly average balance had dipped to a couple of hundred rupees below the 5000 mark.
A few days later, I logged on (after a gap of nearly a month) as a routine check on all accounts and couldn’t figure out a debit of nearly Rs 800. Intrigued, I called their support people and when after several tries I finally managed to get through, was told coolly that the average balance had dipped and hence the penalty imposed.
Given that this bank is so tech savvy and can call you for everything they want to sell you from overdraft facility to credit cards and loans, why the dickens can’t they inform you in advance that you need to beef up your balance? It’s a simple matter of transferring funds from one account to another and that can be managed on the Net.
It looks like this bank, that we had raved about when it changed our perception about banking in India, is adopting worst practices from the gang of foreign bankers like Citi, ABN Amro and Stanchart.
800 bucks is not a huge amount, but the stealth with which it was ripped off in the name of some minimum balance rule is what is galling? So all you guys who bank with ICICI Bank, watch out lest you get gypped. For those who aren’t customers yet, watch out lest you get trapped.