Ombudsman can help sort out your banking problems

Patna: What shall you do if a bank charges service money for clearing your cheque that is on a par and a multi-city cheque? What shall you do if a bank does not give you an NOC even though you have repaid a loan taken from it? What shall a woman do if a bank asks her to repay the loan taken by her late husband, which also had an insurance cover? The answer lies with a banking ombudsman.
A banking ombudsman, a not-so-known service among bank customers, is there in every bank and also in Reserve Bank of India. The office of Bihar-Jharkhand banking ombudsman disposed of 4,531 complaints in 2014-15.
Even many cases of fraudulent ATM transactions, including IRCTC bookings, were addressed by RBI banking ombudsman in favour of customers after it was proved that the customers suffered due to the carelessness of the bank, said Bihar-Jharkhand banking ombudsman Smita C Kumar while presenting the annual report on Tuesday.
Every bank is supposed to monitor online transactions of the customers. It has to send an SMS alert every time such a transaction is made. “We got a case in which the customer hardly did any online transaction but as many as 15 mobiles were recharged with his money. This should have alarmed the bank, but it didn’t react. In such a case, the customer was paid the money by the bank,” she said.
The RBI banking ombudsman handles a variety of such complaints with most of them pertaining to pension and debit and credit cards. Many complaints related to loan, deposit account and remittances.
But it’s not correct to approach the RBI banking ombudsman directly. Complaints, if any, must be registered with the banking ombudsman of the bank concerned. The RBI banking ombudsman should be approached only if the grievance is not addressed within a month or is addressed unsatisfactorily. For that, the customer must furnish his/her name, account number, address of the account holder and the bank branch concerned besides as many documentary proofs as possible.
“One gentleman approached the RBI banking ombudsman stating his cheque had not been cleared for long. The bank (in which the cheque was deposited) said it has not got the money from the bank (which was to disburse the money). We said it was the matter between two banks and the customer must not be harassed. The customer had preserved the counter-receipt of the deposit and his grievance was addressed,” she said.