Tuesday, May 15, 2007

System Down

The new slogan of banking inefficiency in Nigerian or perhaps the new wave of sign of incompetences on the part of our banks is 'system down'. If you are a regular visitor to various banks in Nigeria, pray you dont encounter the 'system down' problem of those banks. They delay you for hours. Yesterday alone, colleagues in office narrate their ordeal with 2 different banks (Fidelity and UBA) their system is down and so noone was able to transact business yesterday, probably there are other banks that has the same problem yesterday.
Most of them that do claim that they run online banking to make services faster indeed always end up making their services longer. I just dont get it, it is now becoming a regular occurence of Nigerian banks to fall into this problem most of the times.
As if that is not enough, they boast that with the online system, you can draw your cheque anywhere in Nigeria and cash your money, but the reverse is the case especially when you are trying to cash interstate cheque. They first collect the cheque from you pretending you will be attended to, but later on draw your attention to their inability to honour the cheque with smart excuse of 'signature irregular' The truth actually is they dont want to go into the strenuous task of having have to contact the branch of where the cheque originates by faxing the cheque to them to verify the signature, whereby the branch will also call the account holder to confirm if indeed he draw such cheque. But if it were to be receiving payment, it does not entail all this protocol. Has anyone pause to ponder whether Nigerian banks are indeed ripe for online banking?

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