Staff Writer
HARARE – Standard Chartered Bank Zimbabwe was last week forced to retract its earlier notification to clients on the manual recovery of bank charges back dated to November 2017.
In a message to its clients on last Tuesday, the bank said: “Please note we will be manually recovering mobile banking charges for transactions dating back to November 2017. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.”
This caused uproar among the bank’s clients. The financial institution however had to retract the message yesterday after Business Times had made several efforts to get an explanation around the move.
“We retract the message sent in error on 17.07.18 relating to mobile banking charges being recovered from November 2017.We regret the inconvenience caused,” said the bank although this was before they had tried to stop this publication from pursuing the story.
A well-placed source at the financial institution said the charges would have been unacceptable and illegal considering that the financial institution’s financials for 2017 were closed and the bank declared a profit.
“The move was against consumer protection legislation. That’s the state of the organisation at the moment and it’s quite embarrassing,” the source said.
StanChart Zimbabwe is a large commercial bank, serving large corporate clients, upscale retail customers and medium to large business enterprises. As of December 2017, total assets were valued at $815,8 million with shareholders’ equity of $84,6 million. As of May 2018, Standard Chartered Bank Zimbabwe had a staff complement of 582.
Standard Chartered Bank Zimbabwe is the oldest financial institution in Zimbabwe, having been established as Standard Bank in 1892.
