High transaction fees and poor customer service from business banks frustrate entrepreneurs

What cheeses off entrepreneurs the most about business banks in Singapore? To find out, we did an informal poll on Facebook and got some answers: a huge chunk highlighted cost transaction fees as a bugbear, while poor service attitude and slow response times received a lot of enthusiastic nods.

We got a hint of these concerns from another group of entrepreneurs we surveyed a while ago. Many of them have been held back by long waiting times and queries that went buried. My own experience with UOB wasn’t ecstasy either. I attempted to contact them an entire Friday afternoon, and they virtually ignored me.

For overworked entrepreneurs who don’t have a lot of time to waste, such service standards are unacceptable. So I spoke to a few more entrepreneurs to find out what they have to say. Their responses below.

Nicky Szmala, co-founder and managing director of Acheevit, a gamified online platform for salespeople. Uses Standard Chartered Bank.

I do had some questions on my token (it seemed to be broken) and international bank transfers (to pay a developer abroad). I didn’t received any helpful answer on what is wrong with my token. The main response from the bank clerk was that he is not trained with business customers. That was quite surprising as I believe that they use the same kind of token for all their bank accounts. I asked for someone who knows about their business products but he refused and told me that this branch doesn’t have anyone trained.

Then for every question I asked the bank clerk needed to check back with someone in their back office. He literally disappeared for 10min before coming back. After 45 minutes I asked one of his colleagues for a glass of water. It took them another ten minutes to bring it over (after I reminded them).

What I felt most annoying was that there were enough staff in that ION Orchard branch. But most of them were more involved in private talks and trying to look good.

I’ve also dealt with their business customer hotline to help with the token. It took three different call agents to solve my problem. All in all that process took more than a couple of days.

Luke Bower, owner and director of Xpander Group, a boutique consultancy and distribution firm. Uses OCBC Bank.

Charging S$20 for a second net banking token is quite interesting. Ideally two should be given, and any additional should be charged. Most organizations will have a Director (or multiple directors), an accounts person, or a CFO.

OCBC Bank’s GIRO is S$0.10 per transaction which seems quite minimal, but the nature of our business may require for us to complete huge amounts of these transactions. The fee doubles in the second year of account being open. Given the processing time for GIRO, I don’t really know how they can justify any cost for it, but realistically they either need to improve the processing times or half the fee.

Also, an OCBC foreign currency account requires a minimal balance of US$10.7k to open, which is not an issue for us but I would imagine it would be for a lot of start ups. The S$25 monthly balance fee for the entrepreneur account if a balance falls below S$8,000 is also too much. Again, that’s not an issue for us, but the account is called the “Business Entrepreneur Account“. Many startups, entrepreneurs, small business, and so on may find this difficult.

My concern with the banks come down to the lack of flexibility in the product offerings and how the bank’s customer service reps fail to understand the actions we require to be completed. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect customer service reps to be that commercially savvy, but some consistency in the messaging should be achievable.

For example, trying to put in place a ‘standing instruction’ (or standing order) to move funds from trading accounts to holding accounts on set dates. Or when doing transactions in foreign currency.