AUG. 16, 2007. I was quietly commemorating Elvis’ 13th death anniversary. Unknown to me at the time, somebody using BDO’s terminal 6654 at 10:30:30, hacked into my BDO telebanking account and withdrew P50,000.
It was only several days later that, by undertaking a balance enquiry, I found that the money had gone.
I immediately made representations to BDO whose local manager, initially cynical about my motives, eventually made contact with the bank’s head office. Some days later I heard that the money stolen from my account had been returned.
***
In February 2020, Sen. Sonny Angara submitted Senate Bill No 1329.
This is an Act “providing for the protection of financial consumers and for other purposes”.
Good thinking.
Section 2 gives a declaration of policy which specifies that the State shall implement measures to protect the following rights of financial consumers:
* Right to equitable and fair treatment
* Right to disclosure and transparency of Financial Products and Services
* Right to protection of consumer assets against fraud and misuse
* Right to data privacy and protection
* Right to complaints handling and redress.
Redress. To remedy or put right an undesirable or unfair situation. This could mean a refund of money lost by a customer as a result of weakness in the bank’s systems. This is acceptable when it takes place without delay and without an adversarial or unpleasant dialogue between the customer and the financial institution.
Such an example happened to me one Sunday morning in August 2014 when Security Bank phoned me to ask if I had withdrawn P40,000 from my account. “No,” I replied. It turned out that a fraudulent ATM transaction had been carried out. This was extremely common in 2014 as several banks ignored BSP “instructions” to replace existing ATM cards, easily skimmed, which enabled fraudulent transactions to take place, with updated cards, with an EMV chip which cannot be skimmed.
Security Bank quickly refunded the money stolen. No further redress needed or sought. No harm done. Case closed.
***
But there are occasions when a customer experiences anguish (“sleepless nights”), or unpleasantness, or unreasonable delay, in a dispute with a financial institution where a refund is insufficient redress.
I had such as an experience with Philam Life. In a meeting with the then Chief Distribution Officer, he asked me what I wanted.
“The truth,” I replied.
“So do I,” he concurred.
But Philam Life successfully (to them) buried the truth which I eventually found much later. The truth did not reflect well on the probity of the institution so it was not surprising they did not want it to be found.
***
Transparency International has found that the Philippines ranks 111th in the corruption league table with deals with government instrumentalities. This means that there are 110 countries deemed to be less corrupt than ourselves.
I believe there is equivalence with the financial sector where most countries have higher levels of probity in their financial institutions than ours.
Regrettable.
We can do much better./PN
