The Citibank Salary Account SabotageThis year, Citibank seems to have planned to play with my salary account too. There was good debit of INR 500 plus a bouquet of service charges and tax in the month of February. As usual, the Citiphone started to sing lullaby claiming that your accounts manager should do something and your relationship manager would contact you. Can’t these guys be more responsible in having a single point of contact for liasoning with the bank instead of putting into arena some zillions of half-baked idiots who just keep loitering around with the pure objective of tormenting the customers. Emails to indiaservice@citicorp.com too just was stinking with gibberish crap of responses. After a big hassle, in the month of March, the unwarranted debits got reversed. And they just played foul again. They claim that the salary account privileges are no nore and I needed to convert to some crap Suvidha Corporate Account.

This month (March) again Citibank debited my account for about the same amount and service charges plus taxes. This time when I checked the balance in the ATM and instantly bashed the Citiphone from the ATM helpline, there were two type of responses:

CitiPhone Executive 1: He banged the phone immediately and then called me over my mobile claiming that the line got disconnected but he was trying to explain that nothing can be done to reverse it or correct the blatant mistakes of the bank. He could not even check the previous conversational histories.

Phone Executive 2: During the previous month conversation, they used the term ‘Corporate Suvidha’ and now this guy used ‘Core Account’. I really wonder, if these guys would keep changing the account names that very frequently.

Again asking indiaservice@citicorp.com and going through the full hassles, by the start of April, the unwarranted debits got reversed. 

With the help of Bank of India Fixed Deposit Online Calculator, I checked how much Citibank is liable to pay me for my money with them. Here is the breakup:

1) Amount per month: INR 513
2) Total Amount: INR 1026
3) Interest Rate for 42 days in Total: 5.5 [State Bank of India Fixed Deposit Rate at then period] [Source Courtesy: http://www.indiaatbest.com/fd_rates.htm]
4) Total Amount Payable to me: 1032

I have also requested Citiphone a clarification regarding the above. Let me check out the responses and keep you posted over the development and responses.

My collegue (Santosh Kumar Sinha) used to tell me that every month he faces a piquant problem with Citibank that inspite of his Citibank Account being a zero balance salary account, the bank deducts service charges for non-maintenance of minimum balance. They claim that the minimum balance is one lakh rupees.