If you are here for economy, you’ll be gravely disappointed. This is nothing like what you expect this to be. I’ve been using Online Banking for sometime, almost like 6+ years to date but I recently had encounter with the online version of biggest bank of India, The State Bank of India.
I’m used to adding a inter-bank beneficiary and on confirmation via OTP you are ready to do a fund transfer. I had the opportunity to use SBI instead of my preferred bank. Took some time to get hang of the UI which I consider normal but what followed was bewildering. I received the OTP and approved the beneficiary. But, hold on… I could not do a transfer still.
The fine print says:
A new beneficiary, if approved by you during the period from 6.00 AM to 8.00 PM (IST), will be activated on the same day within 4 hours. Beneficiary approved beyond this period will be activated on the next day after 8.00 AM (IST). If you wish to activate the beneficiary immediately with full transfer limit, please use the ‘Beneficiary Activation by Branch’ link appearing under ‘View’ tab of this page.
That means even for online fund transfer and getting the beneficiary confirmed it takes 4 hours and after 8PM IST it goes to next day. C’mon SBI do you make one person sit at a desk and assign him task to manually approve requests. Automation just choked.
I see a link ‘Beneficiary Activation by Branch’ and it seemed like the hero in shining armour. On clicking the link, hero was more and the shining armour was the mirage.
Seriously SBI, who thinks of the logic? In case you’ve some weird sense of security in mind that someone will access the private login, add a beneficiary and do a online transfer, well in that case OTP sounds like too fancy. Also, since there is cut off time for NEFT doesn’t mean you too need a cutoff time to stop adding beneficiaries. I could add a beneficiary and fire a transaction away and next morning the first transaction to be processed by NEFT will be mine and I’ll live happily with it but instead you want people to keep visiting your page ‘x’ times in 4 hours because page says, it’ll be done within 4 hours or have to wait till next day and then do a transaction which will be picked up by some random NEFT time.
So, onlinesbi.com is nothing but an extended form of branch banking with the you staring at your screen rather a human. Does SBI have actual humans sitting inside their ATM machines too?
Update (10/02/2015):
Beneficiary was finally added but I never knew SBI could take things to THE NEXT LEVEL. Currently I’m in UK and follow a skewed form of Indian timezone of +5:30 hours. I tried doing the fund transfer to the account I added recently.I did cross the 8 PM IST timeline so my transaction will be processed the next day for NEFT. This is acceptable but then SBI did something which no one will ever expect.
You cannot schedule a transaction for a new interbank beneficiary for four days from the date of activation.
Really? Seriously? OMG? WTH? Even after adding a beneficiary, I can not schedule a transfer because some dimwit think SBI Online Bank users are
- Jobless
- Have enough time to kill
- No hurry for fund transfer
- Never face emergency
- Never ever again use the online mode and stick to the same old format
Do share your comments and woes working with The State Bank of India. They will never take note of it.