Hi,
I am a customer of ICICI for almost 5 years. Initially the service was good but with time it has been degrading gradually. Be it personal banking, vehicle loans, or credit cards it has failed badly.
Personal Banking:
I have used Quantum optima option with my savings account. But the funniest part is the moment your operating balance goes below a certain amount, it breaks one of the deposit and adds the amount back to your operating balance. And if your deposit crosses a financial year, for e.g. from June’03 to June’04, you are in for worse. The account statement for March’03 will show some TDS deductions on the earned interest and on maturity it might not reflect the amount as you expected.
For eg. you started a quantum optima deposit of 3000 on 1st June 2003. Initially the statement will show a maturity value of 3500 on 1st June 2004. Let’s say there was a TDS deduction of 50 in March 2004. Now you would expect that on maturity, the actual amount should 3500 - 50 = 3450. But this is not what it reflects in most of the cases. It would reflect a amount of 3449 or something less. In some cases it even reflects a difference of 2 Rs. The bank officials say it is due to the rounding off while calculating TDS. But then the diff. should be only within Rs. 1. Imagine if this 1 Rs. difference is there with each and every customer, the bank is saving crores of rupees on the interest payable.
So finally I decided to do away with quantum optima option. The only good part of this scheme was some neat earnings on your extra money in savings account. But now that the interest rates have gone so low it is better to keep the money as it is and save the headaches caused by the bank.
ICICI Vehicle Loan:
This service is even more worse than personal banking. I took a Pulsar on loan from ICICI. Since I have a ICICI savings account I opted for auto-debit of instalment. But one fine day a person from ICICI loan dept. came to my residence to collect the instalment in cash with some default charges of Rs. 150.
According to their records the auto-debit transaction got bounced due to insufficient balance. I showed him my monthly statement and proved that at no point the balance was low. He then agreed to waive off the extra charges of 150. Again after few months, it came to my notice that in one particular month, two instalments got debited. I had to personally go to their head office and waste my 4 hours to revert back one of the instalment.
There are numerous other cases which I got to know from my office colleagues that proves the inefficiency of this bank.