Saturday, May 31, 2008

Unethical practices of ICICI money transfer

ICICI is an Indian bank that provides money transfer services that is used by many to send money to families in India. Following are the unethical practices they follow:
1. For one of the services (e-transfer) they claim to transfer the money in 4-5 business days. This never happens as they end up taking two weeks to do so.
2. Even though Money is debited in just two days but the status is kept shown as "Money likely to be debited" for another one week.
3. ICICI uses the minimum exchange rate of those two weeks to convert the money instead of the rate on the date it was debited.
4. They manipulate the exchange rate. Following are the snapshots of exchange rates taken from three services at the same time same day. One from Yahoo finances, Second from Remit2India (Another service) and the third from ICICI. When the exchange rate is around 42INR, ICICI shows it to be 40ish. The difference clearly shows unethical manipulation that they can be sued for. Following are the three snapshots (from left to right: Yahoo finance, Time Money (Remit2India) and ICICI:

6 comments:

Unknown said...

so true. they don't tell you ever at what point they executed the exchange as that will reveal the exchange rate they applied. I once patiently spoke with them for 3 hrs upping till a manager asking to explain me this, but they kept evading the questions and giving the same recorded answer. remit2india is better (given so few choices)

Admin said...

ICICI Bank is charging different floating interest rates to its new and existing home loan customers. When interest rates went up, ICICI Bank immediately increased the floating interest rates for its existing customers. Now when RBI has reduced key rates, ICICI bank is passing on the benefits only to the new customers and not to existing customers. Existing customers are still being charged at rate of 13.25% while new customers are being offered lower floating interest rates of 9.25-10%. Over and above this, they are also charging pre-payment penalty so that existing customers cannot switch to other banks which are offering home loan at lower interest rates. Let us all sign the following petition against the bank. RBI should intervene to stop this practice.


http://www.petitiononline.com/bagla27/petition.html

Spread the awareness of this petition.

Ashish said...

Admin,
No bank will do that. The rate of 13% was an agreed upon rate between you and the bank so they won't change it. Unless the entire real estate market tanks and you lose your equity and bank is financially in jeopardy and has toxic asset on it's account they won't even renegotiate the loan agreement.

Admin said...

The agreed upon rate was not 13 %. The agreed upon rate was PLR minus 50bps which worked out to 7.25% at that time. when interest rates increased they increased their PLR immediately so that home loan rate reached as high as 13.5% and now when interest rates have gone down these goons dont want to reduce their PLR. Is it fair?

Ashish said...

Admin,
I did not know the loan type. They are legally bound to do so and if they refuse you should be able to file a law suite against them. Thats the whole point of prime based loans. I would recommend call an adviser.

Devid said...

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