HSBC
Of the different banks I have my acccounts with, one bank which has consistently managed to piss me off everytime I have interacted with them is HSBC. Though I have had an account with them only for about 3 months now, I have already had sufficient experiences to hate not like them for a lifetime.
It all started with the opening of the account. It took the HSBC guys over a month to get the account and the debit card functional. They sent the account details, the debit card and the cheque book after about 20 days and the Debit Card PIN took another 20 to arrive after repeated calls to their office. In the meantime, I used the cheques to transfer money from the HSBC account to the others to draw money. In contrast, When I opened an account with ICICI a lil’ over a year ago, the bank representative handed me the debit card, the PIN, cheque book right on the spot after I filled the form. It was quite simple, he just mapped the serial #'s on these items to the serial # on the form and my account, the card were all functional and I could access the account via the internet as well, which gets me to my next concern with HSBC.
Getting to access the HSBC account via the internet needed undergoing another filling up of online form and waiting for another 15 days for the secure ID to arrive. Apparently, the secure ID provides a second level of authentication after entering the user ID and password. It does not make any sense to me why there is a secure ID to access the account via the net, but not for any transactions done at the ATM. And also, *I feel* the secure ID just has about 10-15 PIN's of which it gives me any one number randomly. I am not trying to say that the device is dumb but I have a feeling that if I note down all the possible numbers it can generate, and enter any one when the web page prompts me to, the site would work. I am quite tempted to experiment this right away but their site is not working.. Thanks to some migration that they have done. I have tried to log in 4 times so far since yesterday when they did the migration, but I have not been able to make it through.
A week ago, I ordered for a new cheque book. The cheque book reached faster than I had expected, and even as I was thinking if it was too premature to form an opinion about the bank, I bumped into 2 extra characters that has been appended to my surname and that is how it is printed on all the 25 cheque leaves. My last name is NARAYAN and not NARAYANAN. Just the 2 extra characters would notionally make my name sound like a tamilian's. NO, I don’t have a problem with it, I am not a person who looks at people based on their geographic origins and don’t really care what someone infers based on surnames. But, I just don't like it when someone tampers with a name especially when someone adds a pair of AN's to a name which already has 3 pairs of them. And moreover, in this case it just goes to show how carelessly these guys operate. I am sure no one would have even bothered verifying to see if the name printed on the leaves is the same as the one in their database.
A friend of mine who has dealt with this bank for longer than I have jokingly once said that the H and S in the name HSBC do not mean Hongkong and Shanghai.. It only means Hyderabad and Secunderabad.
It all started with the opening of the account. It took the HSBC guys over a month to get the account and the debit card functional. They sent the account details, the debit card and the cheque book after about 20 days and the Debit Card PIN took another 20 to arrive after repeated calls to their office. In the meantime, I used the cheques to transfer money from the HSBC account to the others to draw money. In contrast, When I opened an account with ICICI a lil’ over a year ago, the bank representative handed me the debit card, the PIN, cheque book right on the spot after I filled the form. It was quite simple, he just mapped the serial #'s on these items to the serial # on the form and my account, the card were all functional and I could access the account via the internet as well, which gets me to my next concern with HSBC.
Getting to access the HSBC account via the internet needed undergoing another filling up of online form and waiting for another 15 days for the secure ID to arrive. Apparently, the secure ID provides a second level of authentication after entering the user ID and password. It does not make any sense to me why there is a secure ID to access the account via the net, but not for any transactions done at the ATM. And also, *I feel* the secure ID just has about 10-15 PIN's of which it gives me any one number randomly. I am not trying to say that the device is dumb but I have a feeling that if I note down all the possible numbers it can generate, and enter any one when the web page prompts me to, the site would work. I am quite tempted to experiment this right away but their site is not working.. Thanks to some migration that they have done. I have tried to log in 4 times so far since yesterday when they did the migration, but I have not been able to make it through.
A week ago, I ordered for a new cheque book. The cheque book reached faster than I had expected, and even as I was thinking if it was too premature to form an opinion about the bank, I bumped into 2 extra characters that has been appended to my surname and that is how it is printed on all the 25 cheque leaves. My last name is NARAYAN and not NARAYANAN. Just the 2 extra characters would notionally make my name sound like a tamilian's. NO, I don’t have a problem with it, I am not a person who looks at people based on their geographic origins and don’t really care what someone infers based on surnames. But, I just don't like it when someone tampers with a name especially when someone adds a pair of AN's to a name which already has 3 pairs of them. And moreover, in this case it just goes to show how carelessly these guys operate. I am sure no one would have even bothered verifying to see if the name printed on the leaves is the same as the one in their database.
A friend of mine who has dealt with this bank for longer than I have jokingly once said that the H and S in the name HSBC do not mean Hongkong and Shanghai.. It only means Hyderabad and Secunderabad.
posted by Arjun Narayan at
3:37 PM
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