Standard Bank Horrible Customer Service

Banking services of Standard Bank has fallen into absolute ruin. I am a customer of Standard Bank with a Professional Banking Account, paying a hefty monthly fee, which would like to bring the following concering instances to their and their customers attention.

The first instance relates to the outage of all Standard Bank's banking services on 21 May 2022, which left both me and my fiance unable to pay for our groceries. To remedy the situation we were advised to visit an ATM and draw the money in cash. We had to drive to two Standard Bank ATM's in the area to no avail as these were also out of order. Upon attempting to draw money from both Absa and FNB ATM's, both rejected the transactions. This left us with no alternative but to try and retry paying for groceries for about two hours until the payment was successful.

The second instance relates to the cloning of my card details and the theft of almost R6,000 from my account. Upon noticing the attempt for multiple withdrawals, I signed into my banking app to attempt to stop my cards to limit the damage to no avail. During this process I had also attempted to call the Standard Bank ***** Line, which to my surpise had me on hold for almost 15min with no response. I hung up and attempted to call the Standard Bank Personal Banking Call Centre line which again had me on hold for almost 15min with no answer. Upon calling the Personal Banker Call Line again, I was then transferred to the Standard Bank ***** Line again and only then was I able to register a case of ***** and request that all my cards be disabled to limit the damage. This process took approximately an hour or more due to no response from any of the listed call centres of Standard Bank.

Upon having my new card delivered to me, I attempted to retrieve the pin to link the new card to my banking profile. Upon calling the Standard Bank Call Centre and selecting the option to retrieve my pin, I was assisted by a consultant and transferred to the home loan department for whatever reason. This call remained on hold for approximately 10min with no response after which I had hung up. I attempted to call the Call Centre again but to my surpise was now put on hold before even being assisted for about 5 min before hanging up. I then received a call back from what appeared to be a personal cell phone number asking me to confirm all my personal and card details in order to retrieve my pin. I hung up on this call as there was no cer*****y that it was in fact from Standard Bank, which begs the question how secure their processes are.

It appears that Standard Bank's systems has fallen into absolute ruin, leaving its customers stranded and the only response by Standard Bank was to shrug their shoulders with a nonchalant attitude . This is the same bank which is supposed to protect its customers information and prevent the loss of funds through ********** activities. In my case unfortunately this could not be prevented and in my own attempt to limit the damage, I was met with the same poor customer service that Standard Bank have been accustomed to demonstrating. This begs the question had the damage not been limited due to their poor customer service, would they have even had the decency to take responsibility for their poor service.

Their absolute disregard for their customers has me seriously considering moving to a bank which treats their customers better. I would not recommend Standard Bank to any customer wanting hassle and worry free banking.