Bank customers transfer fury to reporters |06 September 2012

“You media people are supposed to be the whistle blowers for us yet most of the time you do so little or nothing at all,” said a customer who said he had been at a static queue with 62 – including three elderly people – for an hour awaiting service from a single cashier.

He said although another cashier was later added, that did not help the situation much.
“As you can see there are tourists on the queue, apparently unhappy with something that happened to them at the ATM. This is not helping our country’s image,” said a lady customer.

Long queues were not the only problems:

Two customers deposited the new supposedly “same-day clearance cheques” last week and every day since they have been told it had been forwarded to the originating bank for payment.

“We’ve just been to the other bank they are referring to but there is no record any such cheque has been presented to them for payment,” said one of the angry customers, who after being told to wait for another 15 minutes was given an interim statement showing the money he was after had been momentarily credited into his account but had disappeared just as quickly and marked “debit”.

“They have no record that I took the money over the counter yet the amount allegedly debited is higher than one can take out from the ATM in a single day’s payment so I cannot have withdrawn this amount as it is higher than the maximum one can take.”

“There seems to have been a problem with our system,” he was told by a bank official, upon the same promise that his money would feature in the account before close of business, but as we went to press, the customer said the payment had not been reflected.

“Generally banks in Seychelles do not care enough for their customers,” said a man of UK origin, who said his main concern is the failure by the bank to honour a pledge it had made to support his nature conservation agency.

“They were not compelled to make the pledge but now we’ve been counting on the support in vain,” he said.

A bank official we contacted said the bank was experiencing “a temporary shortage of staff” and the few clerks who were not wearing uniform that customers pointed out are newly employed.

Many in the banking hall said banks in Seychelles are the main bottleneck to economic growth because they lack competition and fail in such roles as giving affordable credit while charging exorbitant interest rates.