Banking

(If you want to skip all this background, and go directly to the steps to make card payments through ICICI Infinity, click here]) With Indian banks making life worse for customers using their credit cards, especially while paying their dues, I am exploring the mechanisms available to make payments for credit cards electronically. After all, if I can currently make payments for virtually any of my bills from the Internet, why do I have to run around looking for a place to deposit the credit card cheque?

In another ridiculously anti-customer move, banks like ICICI and Standard Chartered are charging Rs. 100 for any cash payments made for credit card dues. This move is ostensibly for reducing footfalls at branches but seems like another revenue stream adding gimmik. Actually from the look at the note attached with this month’s electronic statement, there are a number of quite disturbing changes at ICICI credit cards: Firstly, it is the flat charge of Rs.

Uh oh. Doesn’t increase confidence too much, does it? … Crap. You can add billers to the website, but you got to call up customer service to remove them? @#$@#$% (testing blogging from flickr) Update: Instead of just griping like me, Balaji went ahead and wrote to Visa Bill Pay. It only got him canned responses though. Update2: Testing pingbacks for balaji.

Take a look at this post by Bhavin Shah talking about how insecure Visa Electron based debit cards (like my ICICI debit card) are. He has learnt this the hard way when HDFC bank refused to entertain any disputes on a fraudulent charging of Rs. 25,000 on his stolen card. In short, You are not asked to enter your PIN while swiping these debit cards. There is no obligation on the part of the merchant to check the signatures with that on the back of the card.