HSBC Sucks

IMGP4699, swiped from § Tilly Mint § on Flickr.

In case you don't know, our beloved central bank recently introduced rules to further tighten credit card spending. According to the new guidelines, people with an income of 36k per annum or lower can only own two credit cards and the credit limit should not be higher than twice the monthly income. Late last year, Citibank had already sent me an official letter highlighting the issue and asked me to submit my latest EA form. HSBC on the other hand decided to ask their Tele-sales team to give me a frantic phone call the other day. In broken English, the fellow asked me point blank what my salary was (like I was going to entertain an unverified phone call). I was like, "Don't I need to supply supporting documents?!", to which he said I needed to submit three months of my payslip and my EPF statement for 2011. Wow. One would think that I was applying for a 500k housing loan. I asked how why I needed to submit so many documents and he just answered that it was a ruling. Yeah, like Citibank doesn't comply to the same ruling. Anyway, I did not want to argue with the grunt and continued to ask about the procedure for the update. He gave me two things, a fax number and an individual HSBC e-mail account. Goodness. So dodgy. Never mind. I called the HSBC customer service and they put me through to the department responsible for this income update exercise. Turns out that Tele-sales is the correct department and the e-mail that I was given was also genuine. Goodness. But just the EPF statement would suffice. One would think that HSBC would do things in a more professional manner. They should have done it earlier and not rush their customers. Other banks had been doing it in 2011, so why is HSBC lagging behind? If I did not want to retain my HSBC card, I wouldn't have bothered. But oh well...