Salary account with HDFC - Think again!!. Review on HDFC Bank

My employer asked me to open their salary account with HDFC, as was the norm with that company. No hassles. Did that. Went on with life. Trouble started when I switched company. I was asked to open salary account with another bank. A while after HDFC realised that my monthly salary was was not getting credited to their account, the asked me to close that account and open a different saving bank account, a normal one. When I enquired why I cannot treat this as my normal SB account (which I was doing with ICICI - my first salary account was with ICICI and even after I moved from my first employer, I still have it as a normal SB account without any problem from their end.), I was told that my salary account enjoyed certain previleges, (god knows what the previleges are) and that cannot be extended to a normal SB account. I then asked them to withdraw the so called previleges and let me have this account. My problem was I had a demat account with HDFC and this SB was linked to it. Again a big NO NO from their side. Simply becoz the account number of salary accounts were coded in a certain fashion, which is their headache actually.

I underwent the pain of filling various forms to open new a/c, attach the new one to demat a/c, close old account etc. Very much of a pain because I had to do these activities sequentially and not parallely, because of the demat complication. So, that many visits to the bank. After all this, I got a communication from them which baffled me. They had chosed my old account (now closed) to credit dividends and new account to debit commissions and fees. I had to haggle with them again to find out what went wrong and came to know that, it was just a matter of filling one more form. When I asked them why they did not inform in the first place, I got a cool reply. This procedure has recently come into place, and hence we missed out. And I am still hoping my life would get back to normal with regard to HDFC bank.

And all this, simply because I opened a salary account with them.