Pete Carruthers is one of my favourite commentators (he needs a blog!). He sends out a regular email (click here to sign up for free), and is a great advocate (he calls himself a Warrior) for small business (mainly in South Africa, but his stuff is great for everywhere).
His latest email missive tells of his adventures with Nedbank. We’ve had some of those, too, so for your reading pleasure, here is how Pete Carruthers and his bank got on this past week…
An open letter to the CEO of Nedbank
Prologue
I don’t normally take stuff like this public, but this letter highlights a number of issues that I get thrown every week about banks. And a few years ago I wrote about Effective Complaining, and suggested that you escalate to the CEO/MD when you get no satisfactiion. After 4 calls to the Nedbank Client Centre, the promised call from a Credit Controller did not materialise, and I sent the following letter to their CEO [after my first call to their call centre gave me the wrong email address].
In that same article I suggested that if you got no action from the top person, then they were telling you to vote with your feet. In the past 20 years, my only requests to the MD:
have all been met with responses within 24 hours. [FNB had 3 senior managers on the phone to me within 2 hours!]
This letter met with no response. You be the judge.
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Dear Mr. Boardman
Please forgive me troubling so senior a person at Nedbank as you, but I have a problem. Tonight I will be suffering from insomnia, and I wonder if you might be able to help me out?
Let me explain. I am self-employed. This means that I cannot survive without a pristine credit record. Actually, that’s not quite true. The only time that the credit record becomes a problem is when it is impugned. And thats the reason for this missive. You see, although I only have 3 accounts with your esteemed financial emporium, your team has seen fit to invade my credit profile with 4 entries of which 3 are quite interesting. [I use the term in the same way I am told the Chinese say “May you have an interesting life” to folk they are cursing.]
This is a bit of a challenge, and while I have your attention Id like to share that challenge with you. On Thursday last week I invested in a wonderful Swedish automobile mainly because it has more airbags than seats. ABSA took 45 minutes to approve the deal. Santam had the car covered after a 10 minute phone call. But they insisted that I have Tracker fit one of those wonderful electronic devices that can track me [or at least my car] in the event it gets stolen, or I get bundled into the boot. [You’ll be happy to know that I have equipped the boot with a cellphone and a panga. Just in case.] I digress.
You can imagine how astounded I was when Tracker assured me earlier today that I was not good enough for R119/month over the next 36 months. Of course, they refused to tell me why. The best they could suggest was that I touch base with an attorney to resolve the issue. [If I cannot resolve this within the next 9 days, the vehicle will not be insured. Given this country’s indirect taxation system that allows poorer members of society to expropriate the vehicle without warning, you can imagine the amount of anxiety this provokes.]
Having a modicum of technological knowledge, I took advantage of a personal credit check at www.itc.co.za which is great value at just R25-00 payable by credit card. And its a good thing I do have a non-Nedbank credit card, because with the entries your team has loaded into ITC I’ll be lucky if my local Spar accepts cash from me in future.
With some anxiety I tried calling the Nedbank Client Care Centre on 011-7104710. This trepidation because the last few times I had called, there was no electronic option to find a real live human, and I was shunted from one cyberwoman to another. Which reminds me: congratulations on winning the Ombudsman for Banking Services 2004 award for excellence in customer complaint handling last year.
Anyway, today I was delighted that I found somebody breathing at the other end after just a few redirects. Fortunately she recorded the phone call for you [as did all the other folk I subsequently spoke to] as part of your ongoing efforts to improve your service to us clients. Its good to know you take us so seriously.
Before I continue, I must quickly overview my accounts with your bank. They are:
To put this into perspective, may I briefly outline the rest of my portfolio because it is relevant?
The above cards have limits totalling R400,000.
So, as you can imagine, it came as a bit of shock that Nedbank chose to tell ITC that I was in default with their remarkably paltry limits when none of the other cards have a problem. Obviously time to check it out.
By the way, do you know that your statements do not reflect any link to your credit cards? So the 3 account numbers I have from the statements are completely meaningless – making it quite easy to pay into the incorrect account. And here is the provenance:
All of the above explanation leads me to ask a single question, Mr. Boardman. How would you feel if you were in my shoes?
I know that Nedbank, having won all these awards, is beyond parallel in the banking firmament. And I know that the chance of error creeping into your sacrosanct systems is extremely remote. But it does seem a little strange to me that amongst all the banks that supply me with nary a negative comment Nedbank manages to take my ITC record and destroy it at will. I dont know about you, but does it seem possible that, in this case, maybe your team was being a tad hasty? Or is that just me thinking about client service in terms of us small business owners where we cant afford to lose too many of the people that pay our bills?
As a small business owner it bothers me greatly that my future as a financial entity in this country can be so fragile, and in the hands of strangers and that having destroyed my credibility your team cannot tell me when my record might be repaired, or whether it can be repaired at all!
So, Mr. Boardman, how would you feel if you were in my shoes?
All the very best
Peter Carruthers – Author, Speaker, and Business Warrior
Epilogue
As I sent this to Nedbank I placed it in the Warrior Forum, where a whole host of Warriors regaled us with tales of their issues with Nedbank.
I have since closed all 3 accounts at Nedbank, and repaid them in full, and my credit record remains unclean. I have enrolled with ITC for their annual service – and they will notify me as soon as anybody does something silly like this again. And I am astoundingly happy that I have a bunch of other resources at my disposal. What would have happened if Nedbank was my only bank?
August 9th, 2005 Umhlanga RocksPeter Carruthers – Business Warrior
I have asked Nedbank Media Relations for their response, which follows:
Mr Carruthers,
Reading your letter it is evident that a number of errors contributed to the frustration you have experienced. While we acknowledge the bank’s role in this situation, and apologise for the inconvenience, the need for timely card payments cannot be overstated. The listing on ITC is recorded monthly in line with our clients repayment behaviour. This process is automatically done and therefore behavioural scoring is rated per account. We acknowledge that your account was in a credit balance up to and including the statement that closed on 16 April 2005. Thereafter a debit balance on your statement dated 16 May, was due.
No payment was received for the statement billing cycles for the months of May, June and July as you explained that monies intended for the payment of your Gold card was in fact paid into your garage card. As this matter is an isolated incident and we value you as a client, we have as a gesture of goodwill requested the reversal of the charges and fees on your Gold Card. We have also requested our Credit Control centre to update the records with ITC directly and this will take approximately 10 working days. We are happy to supply you with a letter in the interim should you require.
I also confirm that you will be receiving an email under separate cover confirming the above in due course.
Doug Hardie,
Nedbank Client Service General Manager
Post Epilogue
Thokozani at the Nedbank Call Centre – late this afternoon – assured me that my Garage Card had not yet been closed because the branch where I stood for 30 minutes was not allowed to close it, forgot to tell me, and the paperwork has vanished. It turns out that I must also wait until Monday next week, and then phone again to close the other two cards – lest my cheque payments bounce. As a result – Nedbank now owes me R 2059-13, which I have asked them to transfer across to a real bank – Standard.
And in a sublime moment of irony, a delightful Afrikaans lady has just called me to ask where she should send my new Nedbank cards to. If I wasn’t so vexed I’d be on the floor right now.
Should any bank have the right to allow admin errors to completely ruin your credit record? And given my own challenges in getting any valid responses before hurling my cybertoys out, what chance do you have of getting a satisfactory solution when this happens to you?
But it does make you think, doesn’t it?
What seems to crazy to me is that there is no report of a personal connection here with Pete. I bank with Nedbank and have had a great relationship of recent (only of recent) with a real human being. To be honest if I got the kind of stuff he describes, I’d be as hacked as he is. But I’d like to say that at this point in my new ‘relationship’ with Nedbank, that I’d not expect to be treated like this based on the past few months.
What seems to crazy to me is that there is no report of a personal connection here with Pete. I bank with Nedbank and have had a great relationship of recent (only of recent) with a real human being. To be honest if I got the kind of stuff he describes, I’d be as hacked as he is. But I’d like to say that at this point in my new ‘relationship’ with Nedbank, that I’d not expect to be treated like this based on the past few months.