Your name may have been listed as having bad credit on the Credit Risk Management
Bureau (CRMB)’s database with CBN. It’s not a demarketing attempt. It is
purely my experience that others can learn from.
I had a current
account in Ecobank around 2011. My ex-employer moved our salaries there
based on a nice presentation made by the Branch Manager of the Bank at
the time. However, the promises made were not met, so the salary account
was moved elsewhere and we all thought it ended there.
More than
three years later, I had left the company and was processing a loan
with another bank. Near the completion of the deal, they called to tell
me I was owing Ecobank. I was advised to sort it out with them before
any progress could be made. I didn’t take any loan. The account didn’t
have an overdraft facility. It was a basic current account from which
you could never withdraw above your available balance at any point in
time. How could I owe on the account?
I called their customer
care and the lady insisted I must have taken a loan. I insisted I did
not, and tried to convince her to look into the account to see what
could have happened. She rudely cut the call!
I made a series of
other calls and was linked to their Oke Afa, Isolo Branch where the
account resided and was able to establish that it was my dormant account
there that ran into negative. Ecobank made some routine charges on the
account and when they depleted what was there, they made negative
deduction of N119 and the negative started accumulating interest that
had amounted to about N2,500 by late last year when I applied for a
loan.
What manner of a bank would make deductions from a dormant
account? I went to the bank and confronted them. An official explained
that an account going dormant does not mean that charges could not be
made on it. He said a man can be sleeping, but his bodily functions work
nonetheless.
I paid off the money and obtained a letter of
Non-indebtedness and took it to my new bank before they could process my
loan. The great worry: what if I had not applied for a loan at another
bank? How would I have known? Many decades later, may be as a pensioner,
one may now apply for something and they will tell you there’s a debt
of a couple of millions of naira you need to clear.
I’ve
commenced the process of closing the account with Ecobank. Other dormant
accounts I have are going too, even though some of the other banks are
arguing that their own processes are different from Ecobank’s. They
argue that typically, your dormant account holds the last balance there
till you reactivate it. One said if at all any customer’s account goes
into red, his bank had a standard procedure to call up the customer by
phone to alert him. No one called me from Ecobank.
How much was
N119 that Ecobank would go ahead to list me as having a non-performing
loan instead of calling me to clear it. The totality of my experience
with Ecobank has been horrible to say the least. To even collect the
Letter of Non-Indebtedness was a war. It took nearly 3 weeks of constant
harassment to get it ready and on the day I was to pick it up, I spent
three and a half hours in their banking hall.
So folks, check up on all your current dormant accounts, especially those with Ecobank.