ICICI bank = Bad banking, loosing bank, one of the worst bank

 

ICICI bank has been growing at a very fast pace since last 10 years to become largest commercial bank in India, supassing SBI in many aspects.

 

In Year 2000 onwards i saw lots of agressive growth and marketing strategies from ICICI that initially made me think that ICICI is too agressive compared to other private banks and possibly its going quite far not looking into security, customer service and prudent management norms followed by banks.

 

I as well as my company was banking with HDFC which was also among equally known banks as ICICI, but was not as agressive in launching new customer friendly services and technologies in mass scale after year 2000 onwards. While looking at ICICI expanding at brisk pace I felt that ICICI is going for the customers without really offering a great value and personalized service.

 

i always ignored ICICI, but soon after few years news start flowing in like ICICI setup largest ATM chain, ICICI surpass SBI as largest bank in India and lot of nice talk on ICICI. Even Employees in my company start demanding Salary accounts with ICICI and soon I realized that ICICI probably has done a great job and captured large part of the market ahead of the competetion.

 

I started banking with ICICI and so did my company.

 

Internet Banking: My company that now holds multiple accounts with ICICI and very good acocunt balance , applied for internet banking , this is when i got my first jolt of ICICI bank services. An eecutive came and filled the long complex internet banking forms and i signed it, over 3 months passes and we did not get anything to access net banking. we followed up and soon we got the username and password, we created the accout and much to our surprice none of our acounts show in internet banking.

 

We contacted the bank staff that filled the forms but found the staff no more exist and left the company. The new person cam refilled all the forms and sent it to the central head offic ein mumbai, still nothing working. we agian contacted the ICICI staff and they had no idea what happened. then i contacted customer service in mumbai directly. they send a just one secentenced answer that .... something called additional access permissions not filled in the form due to which the account not active.

 

This TIme i personally filled the form with all the data and asked my staff to give it to the bank people to send to mumbai. To my surprise the same reason came back again. I asked them for the exact details of the fields not filled. the mumbai office sent me a scanned pdf form filled my me and makign the page where the information required was not filled.

 

To my surprise this was the first form send over 6 months back, the 2 renewed and filled forms were never received by the mumbai office. I instantly knew that something is wrong with the local branch management. I enquiried and made direct contact with the bank manager, who came to meet me and promised that he will get all the work done with his team. To my surprise within month he was no more ther ein the branch and shifted. The new bank manager again had now idea of ourcase and issues.

 

 

Some how we followed with the sales person and got our work done.

 

Cash management Services: next bad experience cam with their much published cash management service. where they pickup checks from our customers or manage faster clearance. they also give some credit based o the checks under clearance. We tried this service and found its the worst check clearance service. checks deposited thru this system takes more then 2 weeks to clear whereas regular checks get cleared in 3-4days.  We found this service ill managed and useless. This kind of service can be only offered by banks who have strenght in nation wide network. and failure of this questions their networks ability to manage new service.s

 

 

  i thought that may be it was one off problem.

 

CC limit:

Soon we applied for a CC limit with the ICICI bank. We got some ambigious offers from the bank with unexpected terms. IN need of money we thought to go ahead. all it followed with more then 500 pages of multiple agreements, over 300 signatures and repeated mistakes and corrections in the agreements that wasted over 3 months for a simple cc limit process that take just 1 month with other banks..

 

 

Overall I think that the ICICI bank has some serious problems in their management and branch management system. specially related to unmanaged proesses that are highly employee dependent and employees are leaving the organization too fast. Be aware of ICICI bank and do not bank with it for reasons for large banking network and prestiege.

 

The bank is as good as its branch office or bank manager. this was true for banks like SBI in old day but so it true for ICICI bank specially for anything more then basic banking. I suggest peopel to look at HDFC banks if you wnat happy banking,

 

 

 

Pune to Shirdi Sai baba, Holy place in Maharashtra, India

 

Shirdi Sai baba is a famous holy man, prayed on par with God in Western and Southern India.

 

Journey:

 

- Pune - Ahmednagar - Shirdi

 

- I started my Journey from Pune in my car on Saturday moorning at 9am. Within Short time I was on Nagar Road ( that goto Ahmednagar).

 

- Pune City - Wagholi strech of road is in a big shock, road widening and development is happening haphazard way. but there are some new upcoming IT parks.

 

- After Wagholi the road become good and you need to pay Rs.31 per car as a Toll. for the road built by Ashoka Infrastructure. The road is good but pass by few Villages where the traffic become very slow.

 

- Industrial VIllages like Ranjhangoan come on the way where you can see some large factories, including that of LG Electronics. This nice road continues till about 50 Kilometers. when there is a right turn towards ahmednagar. Then there is a road to ahmednagar which is under unplanned widening and you get patches of good and bad streches.

 

- After about 30Km on the left you can find a hill with lot of windmills. at this place itself you can come accross a resturant called Smile Stone, this is one of the best resturants on the way and most other are useless. here you can get good maharashra or south indian food. Here you can also see few Ostrich and Ducks being kept in a nicely designed garden. This is nice place to stop at.

 

- Ahmednagar town has nothing much to see. normally the highway skips the main market. main market area is very congested.

 

- We reached Shirdi after about 5.5 hours of car journey. Shirdi was a better then developed place due to tourism. i thought it would be just a village. but you can find more then 50-60 hotels and resorts. The Sai baba devasthan (holy place) entrance is just on the main road, this is where the traffic automatically becoms very small.. On weekends most hotels will be full. It is very strange that when i searched online i could only found 2-3 hotels for online booking. but there were nearly more then 50-60 of them.

 

 

 

 

 

Oversears Trading from India

Overseas Trading from/in india is very new.

- Indian investors are not exposed to international trading and investments.

- Most small investors in india believe that India is the best country to invest and best investment opportunities

- Most NRI (non-resident Indians) also beleive that Indian markets can give them better returns

- Most small investors prefer Indain real-estate markets as investment options

But we shall look at these facts agains

- Other then India , China, Russia & Brazil are among fastest growing markets. India is today the lowest performing market among these countries

- There are large number of better investment opportunities outside India

- RBI allow every individual to invest upto USD200000 (Rs.80lakh) outside India

- Today Indian & China markets are low performing but Brazil and Russia markets are still growing fast. Why not Indian investors should make money out of such opportunities.

New Options:

- Trading in USA stock markets provide opportunities to invest in Global markets. e.g. one can invest in prominent Chinese, Russian, Brazil and other internationa stocks (including many indian) listed in USA stock markets.

- We can invest in thousands of ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) which further provide opportunities to invest in any international market worldwide spciall BRIC and developed countries

- It allow investment in hundreds of commodities

- News channels as well as internet provide lot of useful information to invest in international markets.

Investments & Planning for Indian Employees

Follwing information may be useful for you.

- Tax Planning & Investments is extremely important tool for Financial Planning & Freedom.

- You should start seriously start looking into these aspects for short term as well as long term.

Overlooking them now will put you in deep trouble because of following reasons:

1 - Due to massive increase in crude oil & commodity prices the complete global environment is already changing

2 - Currency markets, Equity markets as well as Business environment is changing.

Due to inflation your Savings as well and future well being will be effected negatively and increase stress. Salary increments etc. will be of not much use.

Some of the things to look into are:

1 - Save Taxes: Tax is direct loss of income, try all ways to save tax. As mentioned by me earlier investment in ELSS Schemes & ELSS SIP (Systematic Investment Plans) is best way to save tax. You have Max. limit of 1 lakh to invest per year for this and there is no reason why you should not invest. You can subscribe to SIP that will allow you to invest certain money every month for ELSS and you will not need to run around at the end of the month. I have checked that ULIP, UTI schemes and combined Insurance+Investment schemes are not good way. Treat Insurance saperately and Investments saperately. If you ahve no time to analyze thuis, then SBI Magnum Tax Gain scheme is the most trusted ELSS scheme in India. Having a SBI Magnum Tax Gain SIP plan will allow you to not run around for investments at the end of the financial year. By visiting SBI Mutual Fund office (not the SBI bank branch office) you can invest in this by just filling the fund and no transaction charges (entry loads normally 2.25%).

2 - Demat & Trading: For most investments you need a Demat account and online trading account. I use ICICI direct Trading and demat account. It allow you to invest in Stocks, Mutual funds (like SBI Magnum ELSS), ICICI General Insurance as well as ICICI Life Insurance plus FDs etc. SO you can by all of these online without any documentations. It also allow trading in commodities and overseas trading but that require more documentation. I think that its necessary for all investors to have Demat & Trading account, without thsi you will not be able to take right decisions at right time, due to cumborsome documentation you will keep avoiding investments.

3 - Mutual Fund Investments: Investment in equities is considered risky buy investments in Mutual funds at right time (when market is low) is quite justified decision. But Mutual fund investments are mostly for long term atleast 1 year preferably 3 years. Do you know that most well known mutual funds give 30%+ returns per annum, and many have given 150% or more returns in last 3 years. This is much higher then returns on Real Estate. If you do not have enough money to buy real estate, then its very important to invest money in Mutual funds. This will allow you to increase you money rapidly in 2-3 years and then you can consider investment in real estate. Divercified Funds, ELSS and Index Funds are considered best investment options. you can find best of them in moneycontrol.com

4 - Short Term investments - ETFs: ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) , These are least known but most useful short term investment options. These are like Mutual funds but you can buy and sell them like Shares on the Exchange . They are mainly created to make investments easy, low cost and liquid. You can buy and sell them on same day with transaction costs same as equity shares. Also pverall theya re less risky compared to equity shares. Some examples of the ETFs are

Benchmark Nifty, This is index ETF, means its price is 1/10th of the Nifty (NSE) index. and if you buy 1 share of this you actually invest in All shares under Nifty index and if nifty go up and down , this also go up and down. If you are just sure that stock markets will go up (without knowledge of which sectors and companies) then you cna buy this and you will benefit equally.

Benchmark Goldex, If you think gol prices will go up, just buy one or more share of this and you can benefit from it without having to buy the gold in reality. Gold is a commodity.

Benchmark Bankex , If you think banking sector stocks will go up , then just buy this and you will benefit equally if the stocks go up.

Benchmark Liquid, You can invest in this if you want almost zero risk, buy shares of this and if interest rates go up you will benefit. you will normally get returns little higher then FD but unlike FD you can buy and sell this anytime.

http://www.benchmarkfunds.com is most known company in India for ETFs though UTI, Kotak and ICICI also have recently launched some ETFs. To buy ETF you just need a demat and online trading account like for shares.

ETFs are considered best investment method internationally. In India ETFs are very few but in last 1 year lot of new ETFs being launched.

ETFs are something between Shares and Mutual Funds. They are as easy to buy and sell like shares but they are as secure as Mutual Funds.

You should explore such investment options for personal Investment & planning.

Thanks