Full Preparations on for the 2nd and 4th Saturday Banking Holiday

          The customer facing timings in the Indian Banking Industry are for a major change. Adjustments to the new timings have to happen both from Banking Staff and Banking Customers end.

          All Banks in India whether such banks are included in the Second Schedule to the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934 (2 of 1934) will be closed on the Second and Fourth Saturday of every month.

          The effective date of this move is 1^st September 2015. The other Saturdays will be full working days.

The key changes envisaged as of now are: -

01)  Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) will be closed on 2^nd and 4^th Saturdays.

02) NEFT transactions will not take place on 2^nd and 4^th Saturdays.

03) NEFT will have the complete 11 Batches on remaining Saturdays.

04) Cheque Truncation System (CTS) clearing will be closed on 2^nd and 4^th Saturdays.

05) Locker Operations cannot be executed on 2^nd and 4^th Saturdays.

06) Cash Deposits and Cash Withdrawals through Bank tellers will not happen on 2^nd and 4^th Saturdays.

07) There will be pressure on ATMs for cash withdrawals.

08) In the initial couple of months, there will be a surge of customers on Monday’s, when banks open after continuous holidays.

09) There will be pressure on Phone Banking Team to resolve queries, which in the ordinary course, would have been resolved in physical branches.

10)  Banking staff will find time to engage in hobbies.

11)  The spending habits of banking staff will undergo change, as with additional holidays in hand, visits to cinema halls, malls etc will increase.

By now, all bank branches in India have put appropriate notices in the Display Boards. In the coming days, there would be full fledged awareness programs in all kinds of media. SMSs will start to flow in. Industry level advertisements are not yet planned.

         

Reserve Bank of India recommends Banks in India to appoint Internal Ombudsman

          In a major step towards customer centricity, Reserve Bank of India today advised all Public Sector Banks and select private\foreign banks to appoint internal ombudsman.

The internal ombudsman should have the designation of  ‘Chief Customer Service Officer (CCSO)’.

The CCSO should not have worked in the bank in which he/she will be appointed as CCSO.

This initiative is to further boost the quality of customer service and to ensure that there is undivided attention to resolution of customer complaints in banks.

Apart from Public Sector Banks, select private\foreign  banks viz ICICI Bank Ltd., HDFC Bank Ltd., Axis Bank Ltd., Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., IndusInd Bank Ltd., Standard Chartered Bank, Citi Bank N.A. and HSBC Ltd., have   been advised to appoint Internal Ombudsman .

The above banks have been selected on the basis of their asset size, business mix, etc.

The Reserve Bank introduced the Banking Ombudsman Scheme (BOS) in 1995.

The aim of this scheme is to provide inexpensive forum for bank customers to resolve their complaints relating to deficiency in banking services.

The bank’s internal ombudsman will be a forum available to bank customers for grievance redressal before they can even approach the Banking Ombudsman.

The Reserve Bank will shortly issue detailed operational guidelines to the banks.

Once the detailed guidelines are in public domain, similar advertisements will appear in the Recruitment columns.

Oriental Bank of Commerce

Dena Bank

Andhra Bank

Lakshmi Vilas Bank