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,