Why my friends dont do business with ICICI

Many of my friends got ICICI accounts; mostly because it is the into which our monthly salary is credited. All of my friends then move their money into their respective primary accounts with other banks. One of them uses UTI, another uses SBI, while a third one uses HSBC. I always wondered why. I always kept my money in the same account cos I thought that its easier having centralized control over your money.....having a S/B account, a credit card account, and a demat account integrated....having access to your money from so many ATMs, 24 hour telephone access and so many branches.

When I studied elementary distributed systems, I read that it is not a good idea to have a single point of failure. Unfortunately for me, and also for ICICI, we both learned it the hard way. All this while, when I kept a large part of all my money with a single bank, I did not pay much attention to the theory I studied in college earlier.

Today I ordered for a Demand Draft from ICICI (over phone banking) which was for a pretty big amount. I need it urgently as my brother needs to pay his university fees tomorrow. I was told by the phone banking officer that the DD will be ready in 1 hour and that I may collect it from any branch I wish. I decide that I will pick it up from the Mulund (W) branch.

When I reach the branch, I am told that ICICI bank systems are down and that they cannot access any information and hence cannot process my DD. Apparently none of the people at ICICI's operations and computer systems department knew anything about distributed systems and fault tolerance. They thought that having their back end servers at one location would be fine, and that their customers will be fine if a fire breaks out and if all their servers go down. The customer relationship officers at the bank are noncommittal: I wait for over two hours; but no avail. Oh and since even I have a single point of failure i.e. all my money in a single bank, I cannot withdraw money so that I could get the DD done from another bank.

But luckily for me, I dont claim to have thousands of satisfied customers, and that I can correct my situation of a single point of failure by moving bulk of my transactions to other banks. The service and policies of ICICI also motivate me to do that. A bank loses its credibility the moment it does not allow its customers to access their own money. That happened today. It was certainly because of a technical problem, but they should have done their homework better. It is going to cost them a lot more, maybe even a few customers like me.

My travails dont end here. I finally am able to withdraw the maximum amount of money allowed by their ATMs (some of them are working incidentally), but this amount is far lesser than the total amount of the DD. I still need to withdraw the rest of the money tomorrow. All this in the hope that I can give the money to my brother and that he can get the DD done from some other bank tomorrow. I was told at the bank that I will be able to cancel the DD using phone banking as that is the medium I used to place the order. Wonder of wonders.....when I call up, the phone banking officer tells me that the transaction is now in the scope of the branch now, and that I cannot cancel over telephone. I will actually have to walk into the same branch again and beg them to cancel the DD now as it is of no use to me any more, and plead with them to not charge me any cancellation fee. Sometimes just getting a particular service is not everything; it is important that you get it on time.

Well, all this made me recall my the fault tolerance chapter from distributed systems. I am certainly going to apply it in real life by moving my transactions to some other banks that really work when you need them to.