Dec 17, 2007 05:41 PM
4416 Views
(Updated Dec 17, 2007 05:43 PM)
My association with
Citibank goes back to 1997 when I first opened up my Salary Account
(Suvidha) when I joined up Wipro.
Its been more than
10 years now that I have been using Citi services & I am really happy about it.
The
following are
some of the
positives(as I perceive it):
- Very good on-line
Banking system, quite robust and always dependable(the portal uptime is very
high).There is almost
everything that you could do online - request for cheque books, make on-line
payments/transfers, pay utility bills,
recharge pre-paid phone(very useful for me!), order Demand drafts(never used
it thought but got to hear from friends that they service it
pretty quick & DDs are delivered within one day), set up mobile alerts &
look at your account summary for a good six month time
frame.
- Investment
account that can be linked to your Suvidha account which makes it very easy to
invest in Mutual Funds. If you have a Suvidha Account, opening an Investment A/C is just a couple of clicks away. The bank recommends a good
number of profitable MFs but you can always choose them. Buying & Selling
MFs is just a click away & the daily NAV updates lets you
know the Ups & Downs of your investment. As a newbie to MF investing, I
found this facility really useful.
- Good number of
ATMs in South India. Bangalore has loads of them but when I shifted to Pune, I
found not many to my liking but still, compared to
the overcrowded ICICI ATMs, I would still prefer the un-crowded CitiBank ATMs,
which may not be in abundance.
- Citi Phone
banking facility is really good, do not need to hold long to speak to an agent
& most of the agents are pretty professional.
- Never had any
issues with cheque debits not being picked up or held up.
- Hard copies of
Account summary is always sent out periodically, both hard & soft
copies.
Some negatives(as I
perceive it):
- Till recently,
the online account summary never listed itemized account balance viz. after
every transaction, the balance was never displayed and only
at the end of several transactions, we got to see the total balance in our
accounts. This created quite a lot of suspicion in
my mind that someone
out there was regularly stealing my money from my account:) Luckily, we now
have the account balance displayed in a tabular fashion
after every transaction which cleared my suspicion.
- I once lost my
TPIN & wanted to order for inter-city cheque booklet(not available on the
web site). Could never get this done using Tele-banking & they still
follow the approach of requiring manually signed letters to be sent to CitiBank
Chennai. Its a good security measure but can be painful at
times.
- NEVER sign up for
any loan(personal/vehicle/property)/ready credit from Citibank. They are
exorbitantly priced & even their credit card has lots of hidden charges
with high
interest rate.
In short, if you
just use their Debit banking facility, its a good bank to deal with regarding
easy usability without much fuss.
