Excellent Way of transfering money to ICICI Bank. Review on ICICI Bank

I am in France for past 4 months now, so I have saved enough money to transfer it back to India.

One of my friend suggested to use money2india but he said that he did not know anything about it because he has never used it before.

So I logged on to the website. The website has clear instructions on how to transfer money to India.

There are few ways of doing it.

The website gives you enough details for the information required for the transfer.

I feel that, to transfer money to ICICI acc in India, money2india would be the best of doing it.

My initial interest was Wire transfer.

Registering at Money2India

Registering is absolutely easy, it takes a couple of minutes to register and you don't have to search or lookup for details that you want to fill in the form. (in-fact even if you fill bad address, they don't seem to care, I don't know if it is good or bad)

Let me talk about transfer methods that I have used so far.

Wire Transfer

You select the wire transfer, and fill in the details of your beneficiary bank account and other information in the form.

after confirming the transaction, it gives a couple of page printout that you need to take with you to the bank from where you want to transfer the amount.

The printout has all information that you will need to fill on the bank's wire transfer form.

For the amount I transfered my local bank in France charged me 8.5 euros (this is something I did not like but this has nothing to do with ICICI bank)

One disadvantage of wire transfer is that, you need to fill up a form and then form is fed into the computers by someone, so it is possible for something to go wrong.

Online Transfer (NetExpress)

This is the most easiest way of transferring money back home. The website gives you enough information on how to transfer. I guess I don't have to go into details on how to do it. And the local bank does not charge anything because, the money is transfered to a local bank in France that has tied up with ICICI Bank. I was not charged anything extra for 100 Euros transfer to India. :)

With NetExpress, very less fields to fill and you just have to copy-paste a piece of information (transaction id) and you are done.

The transfer usually takes 3-4 working days but none of my transfer has taken more than 3 days.

Tracking your transfer:

The website has a section where you can track your transfer, but it is kinda misleading and I did not like this feature.

When you make a transfer say eTransfer, the money is transfered from your local-bank to a bank in France that has tied up with ICICI bank, and then the money from this bank goes to ICICI bank in India.

The tracking information would show "Request Received" even though the money has been debited from your acc. This kinda scares you for a moment.

The tracking information would become "Money Received" after ICICI bank in India receives it from its French partner bank.

After that in a few hrs, the money is transfered to the ICICI acc in India.

So you see, you will be really scared if you are doing Wire transfer, because the status would not show money received even though the money has been debited from you acc. :) you may think that the bank might not have filled in the correct Transaction ID required for the transfer.

Some Information on the website

The information on the website is more or less complete but the information related to bank acc that I need to transfer is not very good. i.e. branch code in France means agency code. But I figured it out with my local bank here.

Website Load Time

Sometimes I really get angry waiting for the website to load.

Overall

Overall eTransfer is the best way of transfering money to Indian ICICI acc, no extra charges involved, may be few 20-30 paise more is deducted per Euro, but it is worth it coz you don't have to go to the bank physically and you are assured that you have filled the right information required and you can do it at home anytime.