WORST CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INTERNATIONALLY

Hands down, the WORST experience I've had with a bank. Friendly tip, Standard bank does not care about any of their customers that are living and/or studying abroad. They don't care how the pandemic is affecting the lives of those we care about and worry about back in SA.

I sent money to my SA account two weeks ago with the hope that I could send my mother money using one of their instant cordless services. I was wrong, I didn't realize I would need an OTP pin which would be sent to me via text. Living abroad, I unfortunately can't receive sms's. I quickly emailed them to let them know of the situation and ask for help. What happened next was so disheartening and such a let down, I was passed on from one person to the next, one department to the next, asked to send them documents to verify my identity which I did more than once, I felt like I was being tossed around on a game of hot potato, like no one didn't know what to do with me or how to help me, I had to mass email them on more than one occasion to fond out what was going on and often would cc every person I have interacted with from standard bank on the matter. After a week or more of this back and fourth, it might've even been two weeks, these people come back to me and say no they couldn't verify my signatures even though I have been using the sam signature to make international transactions at their bedfordview center multiple times in the last year when I was there. I have an active account with them, with money that I cannot use and when I ask them to reverse the money and close the account I get a lousy "You're going to have to go inside a branch to close off your account." Are you ****ing kidding me??? What part of living abroad do these people not get. I have never been so disappointed or hurt, this was a major inconvenience for me because I was sending money home to family and even when I opened this account last year I told them that I lived abroad and would be going back in a few months and not one of them mentioned anything about this OTP nonsense. This is an example of how standard bank "cares" for their clients an dhow they don't stand by their values as a bank. If you are living abroad and have an opportunity to bank somewhere else locally, do it. They don't care about you here.

In my lengthy email exchanges I was bounced around by *** *** *** *** *** ***