bad experience - bonds

Good day

I must say that i have had an unpleasant experience with STD bank and quite frankly am very disappointed to say the least. It is unfortunate that you give the media and the masses the idea that you want to help in this period of COVID-19 however, when we your customers approach you, your agents/representatives do not have answered.

Here is a summary of my dissatisfaction. I have been in contact with the bank from 2 weeks ago when the president announced the lock. I wanted to make arrangements with regards to my bond as my husband who is the principle owner and pays for the bond works for SAA and is directly affected by COVID-19.

I was advised to send supporting documents for the request by Thabane Matthews on the 24th of March 2020 of which i did send the requested documents on the 25th of March 2020 and Thabane Matthews responded to email advising that an agent will call me back with regards to my request. To my dismay no one called until I called the STD call centre on the 3rd of April 2020 and spoke to Prudence Nhlengethwa to find out the status of my application and she advised that she was going to escalate to Thabane Matthews and I also wanted to know how much i contribute towards my building insurance which she advised that I had cancelled it. I asked her who had cancelled the insurance as I have not lodged such a request with you and she could not answer and she will log a call with back office - to date there has been no feedback in this regards.

Back to the bond arrangements, well it seems like Prudence did escalate as I was called by Andile on the 4th of April 2020 from the Debt Care Centre. Now you can't have someone call me to make payment arrangements and she can not answer questions related to the repayments. Other than that Andile advised that should we be granted the payment holiday our capital debt will be more than what we had borrowed initially - now this is rather disturbing as we have been paying our bond from Feb 2017 and it is rather impossible that we have not contributed anything to the capital debt. When asking her questions relating to the bond amount and repayment she could not answer and said the information is not available on her side. She referred my call to her Team Leader Alvena Smith who advised that she had a look at my bond account and something does not look right, I therefore asked for the following things from her: 1. Bond statements from inception 2. An explanation of how bond repayments work i.e. of my installment how much goes to the capital and how much goes to the interest. 3. I need someone to call and explain how the payment holiday would work and an estimate of my installment after the period.

Alvena asked to call me back on Monday as she does not have all the information on hand of which i obliged. To say the least she has not called back to date, on the 6th I called and spoke to Andile again who said her team leader would call back - she did not call back to date, instead i called in again and spoke to Kabelo - our call cut and he didn't call back.

I think from the above details you would gather where my dissatisfaction lies with STD bank. The TCF principles requires that FSP's be transparent to their customers at all times and provide adequate and accurate information, you are clearly in contradiction with these outcomes.

At this point I am beyond apologies for the poor service but rather would like solutions with regards to the above-mentioned.

I need to know cancelled my building insurance and under who's mandate where they working under, how does the payment holiday work and how are bond repayments calculated - I can not owe you more than the principle debt when I have paid my installments each and every month.

Hopefully I will be assisted.

Regards, TK Fonte and M Xaba