I have been a customer of Sampath Bank for over 20 years. I’ve used them almost exclusively when it comes to personal banking. And I’ve been a using their online banking application ‘SampathNet’ since its inception.
Following this preference when I started my business, I opened up my accounts with Sampath Bank and immediately applied for online banking facilities. This is when I started to realize the short-comings of their online banking solution. Now some of these restrictions, as they say, are due to regulations.
Since I we are in the out sourcing business, which gets categorized as an export business, when I wanted to open a USD denominated account, I was asked to open an export account. This was seamless. All they wanted was the standard documentation and a declaration. Then I wanted to have the ability to transfer funds between this account our LKR account. For some weird reason which is beyond my comprehension, I cannot do this online. I need to always either send a physically signed letter, or make a request through the SampathNet’s mail facility, after which they make this transfer manually.
What I cannot comprehend in this whole scenario is, when I am the authorized signatory for both the accounts, why I am not allowed to do this transfer through the online banking portal. What ever transfer I enact is a legally binding transfer. Adding further to this confusion is the fact that in my personal accounts, I am able to transfer funds, through the online portal, from a USD account to a LKR account!
Secondly, I do not have an online feature to transfer funds to third party accounts, even from my LKR account. This prevents me from enacting the salary transfers online for my staff. I have to revert to the old school method of sending instructions in a letter, either physically or through the SampathNet mails.
All these would have been less painless, if the SampathNet mails happened in real time. They have a funny way of handling these instructions. When ever I send a mail, it goes to a Relationship Manager who is assigned to my account. The funny part of this RM is they only check these mails ONCE a day, in the morning. And that too pretty early in the day. So if I send some instructions, say around 9.00 AM, this reaches my bank branch, only the next day!
When I think of online banking, I think of real-time. Not with one day’s delay. And to make matters worse, the last set of instructions I sent to them on Monday afternoon, only got executed today, which is Thursday, because my RM didn’t turn up for work on Tuesday and Wednesday was a bank holiday. If you ask me, that I pretty crappy online banking.
SampathNet in fact was probably one of the pioneers in online banking in Sri Lanka. When they launched, they were unrivaled and they were above the rest for sometime. But their problem was, they are resting on their laurels. They are still on the platform that they launched probably 10 years ago. They need to upgrade their technology, have smarter security (I read someone speaking about their password change procedure and the password recovery procedure), and off load as many services as self services so they do not have to spend man hours doing mediocre things.
Sampath Bank, over to you!
1 comments:
Sri Lanka still has some starnge banlking laws. Some of these restrictions are not specific to Sampath banks but is imposed by Central Bank. Having said that I also moved from Sampath to HSBC which gives me more freedom as an predominantly an online customer. Word of warning though, HSBC overall banking service is far worse than Sampath. Many times I have come across situations where their right hand didn't know what their left hand was doing. I was told Commercial Bank is good but still didn't get a chance to check out their online banking.
Good luck.
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