Pissed off by HSBC

I opened a savings account with HSBC couple of months back, primarily because I thought they offer better internet banking than Sampath bank. And I expected their customer service to be better as well.

Last week, I used my HSBC credit card to purchase the camera online. But for some reason, the validation failed and I got redirected to a HSBC (Sri Lanka) error page. Then I simply went back to the site I purchased the camera and used my Sampath credit card and completed the transaction.

Couple of days later, I found out that HSBC have billed my credit card for that transaction which failed. So much for ACID of a transaction! I mailed them through their internet banking solution requesting to rectify it but received no answer. Then I mailed them to their personal banking email address yesterday, and still haven’t received a response.

In the middle, my salary got debited to the account. So I transferred some funds to my Sampath bank account so I could pay my Sampath credit card bill, which has provided me a much consistent service up to now. I had enabled third party fund transfers but this was the first time I used the feature. On their site they say fund transfers to accounts in other local banks are credited to that account on the following day. Now it’s the third day and it’s still not showing that in my Sampath bank account. But the amount got debited from the HSBC account right on that moment. I sent a mail regarding this matter through there internet banking solution on the second day and didn’t receive any response to that either.

I’m extremely pissed off with their service and am planning to close down all my accounts with them as soon as I go back to Sri Lanka.