Insurance and home loan disgrace

I’ve been a loyal customer of Standard Bank since I opened an account 25 years ago. I’m now contemplating moving everything I have with them to another bank I was granted a bond for my house in 2018 and took the house insurance with it. During the last major storms we had, I had severe water penetrating through my roof which damaged the ceilings etc.

I got hold of a few contractors to give a quote to do the work and contacted Standard bank for the claim. I appointed a contractor to do the work. Standard bank sent out a company to do the assessment and when they arrived I had already appointed another contractor to do the work. He was busy removing the waterproofing we had on the roof when the Standard bank representative arrived.

This is wat turns my nut…. The standard bank representative sent through a report to them with photos indicating what the status is. Standard bank then made the assessment on that report that the leaking of the roof was due to “Wear and Tear” and no maintenance was done. Although you can see from all the photos clearly that we had done maintenance with all the waterproofing etc.

They phoned me to inform me that the claim was rejected due to wear and tear and rust, upon which I disputed the maintenance issue and that there is no rust on the roof. I escalated the issue to the Standard bank complains department and received a phone call a few days later. The representative said that the claim was rejected because there was work done on the roof prior to the assessment and that they could not now determine the integrity of the roof and said nothing about wear and tear. Before they could quickly do the assessment to state wear and tear from photos, but now that I escalated the issue they could not asses anything from photos which they could do previously and the reason for rejection is totally different.

I requested the operator to indicate in their policy where it states that you should not tamper with the current installation before an assessment is done. After waiting for 10 min or more the operator said she will phone me back due to system issues. 30 min later she phoned back and referenced the following:

“You must not agree, admit, confirm, offer, promise, pay or guarantee anything to another person without Our written permission.”

This is written very ambiguously and does not clearly state that you should not touch anything before they do their assessment. Nevertheless, the matter was stopped there as nothing could be said or done further from my side. Now I saw in one of my statements of earlier this year that I had an increase in premium and as of 1 April there will be an even further increase. What am I paying for and now they want more.

Furthermore We want to do some renovations on the house and I want to extend my bond. This was before the insurance issue. Standard bank gladly would extend the bond at a higher rate than my current home loan saying it’s a new loan etc etc… I figured if I can upgrade to private banking which I’ve qualified for years ago, I can get a private banker to assist with this. Long story short I eventually had one call from a private banker whom never phone me back. I then asked a friend who's got a private banker at Standard bank to call me. He arranged for a Standard bank private banker to phone me. I again received one call from this guy and he never phone me back.

I’m seriously unhappy with Standard bank and very disappointed after the years I’ve been loyal to them I get this…..