Banks and their forms: A struggling, clueless customer in a non-cooperative environment

Pakistan pursues higher financial inclusion, but the will to help customers remains absent

KARACHI:

Abdul Hafeez is one of the archetypical customers that commercial banks find in their branches located in low and middle-income neighbourhoods.

Their names, income profiles and literacy levels may vary, but their presence is perpetual around such branches – especially ones belonging to the five largest commercial banks.

With cluelessness writ large on their faces, they run from one counter to another, asking bank employees and fellow customers alike to help them fill out English-language forms. They are semi-literate bank customers based in Karachi who send money regularly to their families back in south Punjab or Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.



“Bank staff would help me fill out the money-transfer form back in the day. Now they simply tell me off,” Hafeez told The Express Tribune at the branch of a bank that boasts of one of the largest branch networks in Pakistan.

A daily-wage earner from Dir, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Hafeez lives across the road in Manzoor Colony, which is a low-income neighbourhood. “Bank employees often tell me to get help from a customer instead because they are always busy,” Hafeez said, adding most customers extend cooperation readily after sensing that he is unable to fill out English-language forms himself.

But is this an acceptable practice from the point of view of the bank’s customer services department? Certainly not, representatives of different commercial banks told The Express Tribune. However, none was willing to comment on the record, saying it would compromise the reputation of their bank.

In a country where 43% of the adult population is illiterate, should it not be incumbent upon bank staff to help such customers meet procedural requirements?

“It is not mandatory for bank officials to fill the money transfer form on behalf of a customer who says he is unable to do it himself because of either illiteracy or physical disability,” according to a spokesman for the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

In other words, a semi-literate or illiterate bank customer is left to fend for himself while filling out English-language forms for money transfer because the banking regulator has no specific regulation in place.



The nonchalant approach of the central bank towards this issue is surprising given the current state of financial inclusion in Pakistan. According to the 2015 Access to Finance Survey carried out by SBP consultants, as many as 84.3% respondents said they did not have any bank account in their own names.

As for money transfer services used within the past 12 months, more than half of the respondents said they hand-delivered cash/cheques either themselves or through a member of their families instead of using a banking channel.

In the absence of clear directives from the SBP, it is up to the banks how they choose to deal with customers. According to the Diagnostic Review of Consumer Service Practices in Banking Industry of Pakistan released by the SBP last year, as many as 15 out of the 46 banks surveyed did not even have specific codes of conduct or guidelines to follow while dealing with customers.

Speaking to The Express Tribune, ex-Citi banker Nadeem Hussain said he would be “appalled” if his staff refused to help customers fill out English-language forms. A 28-year veteran of Citigroup who headed its consumer banking division in Pakistan, Hussain says the customer focus comes always “from the top”.

“Once every month I would spend a morning servicing customers at the counter and one afternoon at the call centre answering service calls,” he said, adding that branch staff’s non-cooperation with semi-literate customers is “unacceptable”.

The writer is a staff correspondent

Published in The Express Tribune, December 21^st,  2015.

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