| Address: Bangalore, Karnataka |
Hi
Last year BOB came up with a scheme in which they promised to process home loans in 6 days and also that if we maintain 1Lac rupees in savings account with their branch for one year we will get 0.25% discount on the interest rate of home loan. I asked the employees and manager that "is this discount applicable on complete amount through out the tenure?" manager said yes.
Though we had some time before we take the loan, as scheme was for people who open account before 15th Aug 2009, we decided to open the account and maintain the amount in the account.
On the pamphlet (of scheme) it was not written that whether the discount was for complete tenure or for the year we maintain 1Lac in the account. Because the manager himself said its for whole tenure we found this quite lucrative and our biggest mistake was that we did not take anything in writing, we trusted word of mouth (well we were buying house for the first time).
Also when we went to open the account one of the employees (who knew we were opening the account to avail the home loan scheme) said that we can open SSB account instead of SB account (I don't deny he had best interest for us but, this clearly shows he was not informed that the scheme is available for SB account only and that SSB account is not considered a savings account for this purpose) I asked him "is that okay?" he said yes.
Fine we were more then happy and applied for loan, due to some problems in the documents given by builder things got delayed but as we had opened the account and were maintaining the amount much more than 1 Lac (as the average should be one lac for a quarter), they said we are valid for the scheme.
Finally we got the loan and everything was fine, when we asked that when do we get the 0.25% discount they said we get it at the end of the quarter and "only for 1 year" I was shocked and I said that manager had said that we will get it for whole tenure. We went to manager and he said "No madam it might be a miss communication as it is only for 1 year". We protested and asked them to give us the benefit they said they will, they assured us that they will try and by the time any thing happens, the manager got promotion and was transferred to new location.
New manager said we will try and they kept trying for quite some time( few months )and finally they said that now as you have the SSB account you wont get the benefit for even 1 year, you are not eligible for it any more.
Here I felt cheated and I also realized that we left all other banks for BOB for the lucrative scheme and this is what happens.
Changing the loan from BOB to other bank is a big expense all over again (processing fees and mortgage deed for which we paid huge amount) and hence we decided not to change the bank as of now, but here I am lodging this complaint.
From whole incidence its clear that the previous manager just wanted to lure customers so he gets promotion and the other employee who suggested we open an SSB account instead of SB account, was not completely aware of the rules of the scheme.
Means in good old banks like BOB also, all employees are not aware of the rules and they misguide the customers and here we are stuck with more rate of interest where we could have got better deal from other banks had they not tricked us into this scheme.
So all I would say is don't trust the schemes given out by government banks also.
We definitely want justice and we want the discount for which we did all this.
Avani Jokhla
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