Credit / Debit Cards

Complainant had been maintaining a credit card account for the past 7-10 years. Monthly repayments to the account were being made through a debit order from another bank. The complainant account was blocked as repayments seemed not to credit the customer’s account, her account details were black listed with credit bureaus and her account referred to debt collectors.

Investigations revealed that monthly payments were being debited from the other bank and what was not clear was which account was being credited. The bank maintained that the credit card account number had been misquoted and therefore funds were retained in an internal account as there were problems in allocating the payments. This had been going on for a year and the customer was in the dark as to what was happening despite repeated enquiries with the bank. She even decided to terminate the debit order and pay by hand at the bank every month.

The bank has not taken any initiative in checking why the customer was defaulting. No prove was produced that the customer was pre warning of the banks pending action. When the customer came to complain the bank should have traced the debit order to the originating bank and could have managed to resolve the customer’s complain immediately.

On realizing this problem the bank assured the customer that, the account would be re-actived, a new card made, repayments updated, black listing and debt collector’s information accordingly withdrawn.