MUMBAI: If you’ve just slammed the phone down on the latest bank offering, you’ll understand the frustration of being plagued by constant marketing calls. But guess, who’s to blame? Bankers say it’s you. Surprised? Well, they do have a point.
Since June 2005, based on thousands of complaints, both RBI and Indian Banks Association tried to regulate the telemarketing nuisance and bring an end to unsolicited calls.
All banks were told to maintain a ‘do not call’ registry, which would allow customers to register in case they did not want to receive marketing calls.
The procedure was simple: all they had to do was visit the bank website and fill in a form. And the calls would end in 15 to 45 days.
A majority of the commercial banks initiated the process nearly five months ago.
Now, the problem is that most customers haven’t bothered to register. Banks are wary of revealing the exact number of registered customers.
ICICI Bank was the first to launch the service.
“Today, we have around 25,000 bank customers enrolled for the service,” said V Vaidyanathan, senior GM. Obviously, given that they have 1.2 million customers, it’s clear that most customers still continue to suffer. Vaidyanathan adds: “Not all marketing calls are of nuisance value. Some customers want to know about the products and services offered by the bank.”
Also, not many customers are still aware of this service. Many customers say they haven’t received any word from their bankers. But bankers complain that they’ve tried their best, but in the end, customer apathy is endemic.
“We sent out business reply cards to all its customers when this service was launched, but the response was poor,” said an executive.
PHOTO OFFER: People tend to forget the favourite maxim of classical economists: there is no such thing as a free lunch. And some of them have to pay dearly later for their folly.
A few months ago when some local dailies in Gujarat carried advertisements offering free passport-size photographs to promote a studio, people turned up in thousands.
Within a couple of days, they were provided with two to three free copies of their photograph. People went home happy, not realizing they were being conned into a financial scam.
Negatives and copies were stored by the perpetrators of the IPO scam. It is believed that over a period of time, the scamsters built a library of over 100,000 photographs using the free photo scheme.
The rules for opening bank accounts require that passport-size photographs should be attached with each application.
So, the protagonists of the scam put this bank of photographs to good use and opened thousands of benami accounts.
While the name of the account holders were of their choice, the photographs were of unsuspecting people who had come for free photos.
According to a source, some of those involved in the scam also purchased photographs in bulk from studios.
At times, even group pictures were cropped and used in place of individual photos. In some of them, the arm of a person on the shoulder of another was visible, the source said.
Market players with close links to the investing community in Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Surat said some people whose photographs were attached to the bank accounts used could be caught and penalized for no fault of theirs.
However, in many cases except for photographs, the rest of the meagre particulars given in application forms clearly appear fictitious.
In a series of application forms, for instance, a set of names have been used in combinations to create different identities.
In all of them the father’s name appears the same even though the people belong to different communities. —By arrangement with The Times of India
