banking in india

As far as I am concerned, I feel ICICI is the best in terms of service. But, they also charge the highest service charges and there are too many hidden charges. HDFC Bank has lesser hidden charges and services are also quite decent though not as good as ICICI. Amongst the worst, my experience with public banks like State Bank of India and State Bank of Travancore has not been very good. Cheers! Ram

I am a financial adviser in India. There are many aspects to be considered when you speak of the 'best' bank. Th most important one for me would be the safety of my money. In that case, I'd say that any nationalized bank is far better thatn any private bank. ICICI bank is a private bank. You must know in a bank that your money is insured to the extent of Rs.100,000/- only, even if you have multiple accounts in the same name in different branches of the same bank. So if the bank sinks, you loose all your money except for a measly Rs, 1 lakh. From that point of view, nationalized banks are far safer, because the bank is less likely to sink. The next thing is the ease of accesss to your funds. Even here, SBI has a far greater reach and ATM's. As soon as their networking is complete, you will be able to bank from any of their branches. The only advantage that ICICI has is its timing, but unfortunately their quality of service is very bad. Most of the branches are understaffed, and you have to perforce take a token and wait in the queue for a hour sometimes even for the most basic things like cash withdrawals. Then the other bad thing about ICICI is that once you an account with them or purchase any product from them, your personal records such as addreses, contacts, cell nummers become accesible to all their sales agents, you are sure of a barrage of calls from all their sales associates askng you to purcahse various financial products, and this can be quite a problem. Once I receieved five phone calls with a period of 2 hours, three of them on my cell while I was driving, from ICICI associates asking me to buy various products ranging from loans, to credit cards, to life and general insurance. This continued for almost three months-two to three calls from people per day, asking me to buy various products from ICICI until I threatened to sue them. Even placing your number on the 'No call list" doesn't help. Even today I get at least one call every other day from ICICI associates for buying their products. As far as account balances are concerned, there also they has issues. A friend had a zero balance salary acount and yet for two years in a row they started levying a minimum balance charge. It was only when his company threatened to close their corporate account and withdraw all their funds that the amounts that were deducted were recredited to this account, but he was not paid any interest, and mind you this happened in two consecutive years, twice, so two sets of threats had to be made to them. I have a salary account withe HDFC and find that the experinec with them is good, except that up country checks take almost three to five days to be credited in the account. There HSBC is better, the amount is generally credited to the account the same evening or the next day.

I have quite the same notion as you. For me, i think the best bank in india is icici bank. Their service is awesome. I also have bad experience with hdfc bank. Actually despite submitting form 15 h they deducted tax from my FD.