I have been PINned down

How am I supposed to remember the numerous pins, which my bank dishes out? There is T-Pin for Telephone banking, there is an ATM-Pin for ATM transactions and there is an I-Pin for Internet Banking transactions. Wonder what else they will come up with?

I wanted to transfer some money to another person (based here) and I thought that it would be a simple affair. I thought online transfer would be hassle free and decided to use Internet banking. The fact that the other party also had an account in the same bank made me feel that the transaction would not entail too many complications.

After logging into Internet banking section (by using my I-Pin), I went into the section, which enables such intra-bank transfer. The note there said that I should have registered my Mobile Phone / Pager number with them to enable online transfer of funds. What would be the fate of people who didn’t have mobile phones / pagers or are they indirectly promoting the sale of mobile phones? The note went on to say that I can register my mobile phone / pager number by visiting the nearest branch / ATM. After registering the mobile phone number by using the above said process I proceeded with transferring the money online. After entering the name of the payee, the bank’s software said that a One Time Password (OTP) would be sent to my mobile phone so that I can activate the payee. The SMS, which my bank sent me, contains the OTP and I had to enter this in my PC to activate my payee and then proceed with the money transfer. A transaction, which was supposed to be completed in 5 minutes, took about 30 minutes. The easier way out should have been to meet up with the other person and pay him in cash. Now that I spent 30 minutes on this simple transaction, I decided to spend another 15 minutes and put a post on this issue. With the current state of things how can they expect the elderly to embrace technology? The bank might have its own reasoning to justify the multiple layers of security.

Down but not SkypeOUT

Recently, my dad tried to pay through his credit card for the SkypeOut service. He tried twice but the payment didn’t go through. I was thinking that my dad might have not completed the transaction properly and hence the transaction might not have been successful. To our dismay, the bank charged us twice for this transaction. After reading Mala Bhargava’s weekly column in Business World I found that my dad was not the only one who faced this problem. Lot of Skype users in India are having problems paying through their credit cards. Further, Skype has this (stupid) rule, which says that each credit card can be used to make payment for only one Skype account. In other words, I can’t pay for my SkypeOut account and for my parents SkypeOut account from the same credit card. Although they are trying to protect credit card frauds, they are also losing out on some potential customers. Is somebody listening?