Monday, December 7, 2009

Will Banks take care of your interest ?

I was once young and naive. Banks are so big, earn so much money that they wouldn't bother to cheat my money. Its safe to leave everything to them and they will take good care of my money, especially when I am not a big user ... but ...


Notice in this statement that previous left over balance is only 1 cent. As a matter of fact, this account has been having 1 cent balance for 2-3 months. Recently I had to use up to RM 100 so that I can use ALL the points to exchange for food voucher before cancelling it. Suddenly there is a finance chargees of 22 cents.

How in the world can there be a 22 cents finance charges out of a 1 cent balance ? The finance charge is 16%.

After digging out the whole Eon team including the highest management demanding for an explanation, no one can answer that except apologizing and waiving the said ridiculous calculated fee. I couldn't help to think how many people out there have been abused by such system bug ? 22 cents x 10 million EON credit card holders = 2.2 millions a month.

5 comments:

ChampDog said...

Is it really bug? Hahaha... Perhaps man made bug? I will have no idea if bank deducts RM0.01 interest from my account.

Sherry said...

The same thing happened to me. At another bank.

I wanted to pay my credit card bill and went to the counter. Asked what the latest statement balance was, and it was something like xxx.x1. (I did not have my statement with me, just asked her to check in her system).So dear girl rounded down for me and told me it was xxx.x0.

In the bank's records, it showed I had an outstanding balance. All of 1 sen (through no fault of mine). Because of that, the following month's balance was slapped with an interest of 16% p.a.

TheCurious said...

A two decimal places of "technical" computing error is ridiculous. In fact this rounding off and truncation of just 2 decimal places have never been a calculation problem in the entire computer history.

It's definitely a man-made error on purpose: to retain you in the customer list as long as possible.

Anonymous said...

I just got a flexi mortgage loan with EON bank. Every month, I will be charged RM10 for the service fee.

Recently, I was shocked to find out from the statement, EON bank lumps the RM10 together with the loan outstanding amount. In other words, they are charging interest on the RM10!!! That is totally unacceptable to me. How could they charge interest on fee?!

I have lodged a complaint with the bank credit management. Waiting for their response. I would not hesitate to lodge a complaint with BNM if I don't get a satisfactory reply from EON.

Mt. said...

this one is common for "flexi loan", and all "unpaid" fee will be added to the principal and incur interests. To make it worse, simply adding RM10 to your normal monthly repayment wouldn't clear this 'over-due' status at all. So basically if you engage a flexi loan but did not keep a big saving there or did not repay more frequent, you will most likely end up paying more fee than the traditional loan would be.