Mumbai: Customer complaints to the banking ombudsman (BO) increased by a fourth to 1.63 lakh in the year to June 2018, with a majority of them related to unfair practices, the Reserve Bank said. The country’s largest lender SBI led the complaint list with close to 47,000 plaints, while HDFC Bank led among the private sector lenders with over 12,000 complaints, and American lender Citibank had 1,450 complaints.
In the annual report of the BO scheme, the RBI said a rise in the number of complaints from digital transactions, an ombudsman scheme for digital transactions is proposed to be formulated and implemented during 2018-19. In the year gone by, the 21 BO offices received 1,63,590 complaints, marking an increase of 24.9 percent over previous year, and 96 pe rcent of them were disposed. The major grounds of complaints received during the year was non-observance of fair practices code at 22.1 percent, ATM and debit card issues at 15.1 percent and credit card issues at 7.7 percent, and mobile and electronic banking at 5.2 percent.
