Sub-Standard Bank.

This was not something that happened to me personally, but it is someone who I care about very much. I will be referring to as she/her for the sake of anonymity. After having worked outside of South Africa for the past few years, and only having a cheque account with no credit history, it was time to build some sort of a credit score. After having been contacted by Standard Bank about getting a credit card many times, she finally agreed after much hesitation. This was about a month ago, at the time of writing this. She was very careful as she has gone out of her way to avoid any sort of short term debt, making sure to specify that all amounts owing be debited from her cheque account on the 1st of every month, along with a few other particulars. This credit card was not used at all since she got it. 2 days ago she receives a message saying that her account is in arrears. Mind you, I am writing this a 2 days after the message was received. We spent the better part of yesterday fiddling with Standard Banks online platform as well as their APP, trying to make this payment. Today she contacts the call center in a final attempt to make this payment, as I cautioned her that it would reflect badly on her credit score. She got told that her account is now in collections, FOR THE SERVICE FEE AMOUNT, and she needed to contact a separate party. I feel that this is a terrible 'first credit' experience for anyone, and it puts her on the back-foot when trying to start off her life in a capitalist society which puts a huge focus on credit scores foe both secured and unsecured lending. When someone this meticulous and careful about money has to deal with the consequences of incompetence on Standard Banks part, we need to ask ourselves if we are not better off without them. Banks are a business, they do not provide a service, I understand this very well. It upsets me that the products the business is built around are managed so terribly.

#Note: Standard Banks online and APP lack functionality. It is 2020, we should be able to do everything, including setting up auto transfers between products, without having to set up beneficiaries in a very cumbersome way. Mind you, this did not work for our particular situation anyway.

0/10, would not recommend!