Shocking service for a 20+ year client (personal, investment and business banking)

I’ve been a Nedbank client for 20+ years (I honestly cannot remember the length, because I’m unsure when my mom opened my first Nedbank account, but it’s longer than 20 years). Today, I have all my personal banking and investment accounts (Nedgroup and savings accounts) with them, as well as two different business accounts with them, both with their own saving and investment accounts. I’m in Argentina from 1 Nov for the next three months and I phoned well in advance (somewhere in Oct) to ask what I should do to change my OTP number or whether there was some other solution I could use. I was told to go into the branch, which I did on the 21st of October. They had me fill in some paperwork (called a CID) and then I was told that I could simply call when in Argentina and they would take the instruction via the phone to change my cell number after asking me some security questions. The form was to set that in motion, as it bypasses certain security protocols (for obvious reasons). I asked 3x (yes three) times whether they were CERTAIN that it would be that simple and I was assured not to worry.

Shortly after our arrival abroad, I hop on the phone to call. Sadly, my local sim doesn’t allow outbound calls – not even to their international number. My bad. I know: contact my dedicated business banker. I send her an email explaining things and ask her to phone me if she wouldn’t mind. She sends me a mail asking me to send her a detailed instruction authorizing her to change my number, add my new number on that app and forward the CID to her. I did all the above. It took a week for this back and forth comms – not due to my side. Finally, I hear back and she says I need more detail in the instruction and asking me whether I signed the CID docs and also that my emails need to be sent from a different account (fair enough – my mails were acting up abroad, so I was using a different one). I ask for complete clarity on what she requires in the instruction letter (which I had already done before too), ask which mail she would like it from and remind her that I did send the CID and would be happy to sign any additional docs should I need to. Then I get an autoresponder that she’s out of office. It has now been two weeks of this. I still cannot do any banking since ALL payments on their app now require an OTP – even beneficiaries. I also cannot buy electricity for two properties I manage. I’ve luckily paid from other accounts and will do the accounting gymnastics later, but it’s been quite an inconvenience. I cannot shop online either due to my cards needing OTP’s, so that makes business quite hard back home too.

So Nedbank, after 20+ years, are you going to sort this out and retain me as a client or should I move to a competitor? If you had told me to do more things from the start, I would’ve gladly done them. But your employees gave me the wrong information in branch and now I’m the one left out to dry abroad due to poor service and bad communication. Ball is in your court now.