The 'rise and fall are the “Andhrapreneurs” ' reminded me of my first account with a private sector bank. I had always felt uncomfortable with private sector banks. A couple of interactions with their representatives had left me uncomfortable, similar to my comfort level in 5 star hotels, that is, I don't belong there.

On an impulse, I walked into the branch of Global Trust Bank in Panaji. I needed a demat account and they were on the list given me by the share broker. I was very surprised. 

• It was clean and pleasant. 
• It was tech savvy.
• The person was genuinely helpful.
• I felt at ease.

My relationship with the bank increased. There was once some financial interaction my parents had to do. They visited the GTB branch in Chandigarh and were very impressed as well. They too opened an account there :) Had it been nearer, that would have become their primary branch.

Even after the bank was taken over by Oriental Bank, these branches continued nearly as before. I believe part of the reason must be that the working environment in these branches was much better than in one of the original Oriental Bank branches I visited. 

I miss the absence of GTB and wonder 

• what if election funding was far more transparent in India?
• what if we got rid of the 'First Past the Post' elections given the multiplicity of parties and interests they represent?

I am sure the fate of entities like GTB would have been very different and India would be a far richer and better country.

Harassed life - the problems of paying by cheque

My car insurance may be cancelled because the cheque was returned for 'Signatures not matching'. I have spent the last hour trying to overcome and prevent any complication.

I regret my mistake of having signed the cheque. My hand involuntarily shakes at times and the banks have a problem with tallying my signatures. Normally, I ask my wife to sign if I cannot pay by card or online.

I have had problems with my telephone bill some years ago - bsnl would not accept a cheque payment from me after that! Mobile phone company charged me a absurd penalty for cheque bouncing. In each of these cases, I had a hard time finding a problem in my signature. For all I know, the clerk may have been looking at the wrong record.

Does it have to be so? Is there any risk in payment of bills? What could possibly go wrong, which cannot be corrected?

Should we not assume that a cheque is valid unless it has been reported as stolen or there are some serious problems with it?

I think our society has complicated our rules and, hence, our lives just because the correction process is a problem. For example,

.Justice T S Thakur ... blamed “lack of governance” and “officials’ inability to take decisions” as prime reasons behind the deluge of cases choking the justice delivery system

... the top court of the country was compelled to spend a lot of time on cases involving bounced cheques ...

In the early days at the branch level, sometimes a helpful staff member would call and check before rejecting a cheque. However, now the clearing is happening in the back office in Mumbai and the branch staff is helpless.

I am hoping that soon either mobile payments will make cheques obsolete or robots will make the verifying clerks obsolete. The robots can easily send an sms or call us to confirm whether the cheque is valid and bring back a degree of personalization in an increasingly impersonal world.

Helplessness about events like the Bhopal Tragedy

The article by Indira Jaising was a grim reminder of the past. I think I became conscious of the scale and implications of the Bhopal tragedy only after I had seen the Yes Men Fix the World a few years ago.

I saw their prank on BBC  again. The sadness is about the drop in the stock price of Dow after the prank was broadcast. By a coincidence, I watched Chabrol's The Story Women yesterday and was struck by the statement of one of the characters - "Once you have a little money, you want more".

Increase in the value of my investments makes me happy though with little awareness about the reason for their growth. Investing via mutual funds makes the distance between my 'wealth' and corporate actions even more far removed :(

About time first premium of lapsed insurance policies is surrendered to the insurance regulator

The following statistic in Hiking FDI limit in insurance is remarkably illustrative of  morality of companies:

It is quite disquieting that some major companies have a very high rate of policy lapses like Birla Sun Life 51 per cent, Future Generali 49 per cent, ICICI Prudential 42, Reliance 38 and Bharathi Axa 36 per cent.

It explains that my effort to help a retired person scammed by insurance agents was hopeless.

I can't imagine profitability being any higher than on policies which lapse after a single premium.

Given the above statistics, it would be great if, at the very least, the premium of policies which lapse after the payment of just one premium is confiscated by the insurance regulator.

Furthermore, cancellation of policies should hurt the bottom line. Hence, the insurance companies should not be allowed to deduct any cancellation or service charges when refunding the policies which have been cancelled during the "free look" period.

Private insurance companies are cheating more than LIC

While I would like to be trusted, I would also like to be able to trust. Experience appears to be that while socialism makes people behave badly, capitalism seems to do that to companies!

Will the increase in foreign equity result in better behaviour by the insurance companies or greater pressure to get results regardless of the means?

Moral hazards  are an integral part of the insurance industry. I look forward to the day when software robots are the insurance agents and not commission based humans!

Incomprehensible Customer Service

One more bank tries to make me happy :)

"Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

I found that I could not carry out online transactions.

I had recently disabled sms alerts as it bothered me that they started deducting quarterly for SMS alerts without any intimation. From the branch, I came to know that the procedure for getting rid of SMS alerts is to delete the mobile number!

So, online transactions need me to enter a number sent to a mobile phone, which never reaches me as there is no mobile number! Ah, the system assumes that the phone number exists and no need to check.

I had to call the call center about a solution to this dilemma. How to carry out online transactions without subscribing to sms alerts?

It took a while for the call center employee to appreciate my predicament. The complaint is registered and I got a complaint number. Then came the solution which was beyond anything I could have imagined.

"Call back after 7 days. Tell your complaint number and we will let you know what the solution is".

I suggested that the call center can send me an email - they do not have that facility.

Simply amazing.

I would definitely achieve happiness if I succeed. I have already made a lot of effort. I will have to make some more effort and I am sure, I will need of creativity to get around their system :)

Oh, the site has an email option and, now, even a grievance monitoring option. So far my experience indicates that these services are connected to a black hole. I have never got even an automated acknowledgement.

Scamming of the retired by insurance companies

Insurance penetration in India is supposed to be low. It is hardly any surprise if I consider my experiences with insurance companies. My father who was over 80 kept getting calls from agents of 2 private insurance companies. I was surprised at their persistence in spite of getting a 'Do Not Disturb' on his landline. It was very frustrating and depressing to get these calls for him even after he passed away.

My small protest was that I have not invested even 1 rupee in even the mutual funds of these companies. After the second experience given below, I requested my children to do the same.

Recently, I tried to help a distant relation, who retired some years ago. He was the target of a very friendly and 'helpful' insurance agent from one of the companies which had pestered my father.

The agent gave him a mountain full of BS getting investments in multiple different policies. My relation believed that these were like fixed deposits to help with the wedding expenses of his children.

Actually, he was paying the first premium of a life insurance policy for over 30 years, where he could get the money if he lived beyond a hundred years! He told me that the agent was such a nice youngster! Since the first instalments were from his retirement benefits, the insurance agent knew perfectly well that it was not possible for the insured to pay the subsequent premiums.

Since my relation did not act in 15 days, all his investments are lost. By the way, all the policy details were in English only. The legalese English in fine print was hard for me to decode as well.

It amazes me that IRDA allows insurance companies to target the retired people. It makes no sense to me for a person to take a life insurance policy after retirement, and, hence, such policies should be banned.

India is not unique. I recently saw a show about the Swiss insurance companies on TV5 Monde where the insurance companies were charging a lot more for the same benefits which were provided by the pension funds!

How to hide from Big Data?

Fortunately, I am not using twitter so I am safe for a while from marketeers targeting my personality  :)

I am looking forward to a blogger providing a list of words which I may use in the blogs to ensure that the new software is assured that I am a part of the "neuroticism" segment of no commercial value to direct marketeers in conformity with 

the new software has the potential to serve people as individuals rather than “vague demographic blurs”.

'We’re coming after you' - taxman warn

Reading 'We’re coming after you' - taxman warn, I started to wonder what drives human motivation.

What if the Forbes list of Richest People was based on the quantum of direct taxes paid by an individual?  Wouldn't people want to be on it?

Cyprus Crisis and the Realisation that we are Poorer

A tax on bank account savings seemed so strange that I was wondering who could have thought of it.

I then had the opportunity to send a gift to New Zealand. I would not have noticed the exchange rate except that we had received a gift from New Zealand just a year ago. And how I wish the sequence of events was inverted. The New Zealand dollar was worth about Rs. 35 then and about Rs. 45 now :(

So, effectively, I am poorer by almost 30% and I wish I could swap places with Cypriots and pay 10% but only  of my bank deposits! But I am sure that paying the 10% would have hurt a lot more than the Indian rupee going downhill :(

How to feel very poor - not planning for legal expenses

The news of B. R. Raju's (Satyam fame)  legal bills made me feel really very very poor. That was an expense I had never even considered :( Neither had the idea of an insurance cover had never even occurred to me. This really affected my yard stick of the money one should have and my personal worth:

Tata AIG ... is footing his legal bill of Rs 60 crore so far, and will continue to do so till the court gives its verdict.

The following really rubbed it in :(

...in the insider trading case of Rajat Gupta in the US, Goldman Sachs paid almost $ 30 million (around Rs 150 crore) for Gupta’s legal defence...

But in a world where we have "Betting on Death: Creepy or Not?", what else can be expected?

State of IT Usage in India?

Mutual funds in the old days would give paper certificates. As computerisation increased, these paper certificates disappeared and were replaced by an account statement. Over the years, each purchase became a different account. Some consolidation of the accounts into folios was done but even then I had a lot of folios.

Online handling of the accounts meant that I had to manage multiple folios with multiple passwords. It seemed simpler to try to consolidate them.

The rules were not too complex, though some seemed a bit silly. But without silly rules, bureaucracy would not be able to survive.

Since online purchase required that a registered bank account be used to prevent money laundering, I filled a form to add a second bank account to each of my holdings. That would also ensure that the bank accounts would be the same for each folio that I wanted to consolidate.

Request was rejected because it was treated as a request for CHANGE of bank account though the form was for ADDITION of bank accounts. The change of bank account required some more papers. I suspect that the chances are their IT system could not handle the additional requirement introduced by the regulator.

There was some impact of my request, which I cannot really comprehend. One of my holdings now had the account number of one bank but the name of the other bank! The dividend could not be credited. I had to provide proof of the account which was already there in their computer records! The service centre printed a copy from their system, which I signed and submitted.

I decided to make one more attempt as ensuring that the registrar did not goof up with my bank records was a scary proposition.

This time I carefully consolidated only those folios which had the same bank account. Folios of one bank were consolidated but not for the other.

Reason - the bank details did not tally. That was strange. However, it appears that in their system, the bank details associated with each account are separately stored. For some reason, in some folios, in some of the holdings the other bank's details were present. This is a logical fallacy as per their rules. But their computer system is more flexible!

Since that flexibility is not be used, it clearly implies an erroneous data model of their system.

The process has left me bewildered and worried. As the computer systems keep getting more complex, I will need to monitor my accounts to ensure that no mess has been created.

I have also decided not to consolidate my folios because I wonder what new errors will be introduced.

Or may be they moved their processes to the cloud as they  were too complex - as in tech-comics- let cloud computing make your life-easier.