SIGNING UP
Walking into my local Standard Charted branch, i approached the help desk and asked if i could sign up for mobile banking. The teller handed me some Forms and asked me to fill them in. The Forms were more detailed and required more information than those of other mobile services i ve reviewed so far .
Standard charted's mobile banking allows you to make Bill payments , having Dstv or Topics account details on hand can save you a lot of hustle. After Filling in the form i handed it back to the teller , who then informed that it would take a week for the service to be activated.
CONFIRMATION AND FIRST USE
A week later i got a confirmation sms with a temporary PIN . Dialing *200# i entered my temporary PIN and was immediately asked to input and confirm a new PIN .
I was then presented with a menu . The first thing i selected was the " balance enquiry " option and sure enough it displayed my actual bank account balanced. Next i tried purchasing airtime for my Telecel prepaid account. No confirmation sms for the recharge was sent to my phone , only by rechecking my Bank account balance and prepaid account balance was i able to confirm the transaction had taken place.
DAY TO DAY USAGE
When i sign up for these services i usually take a friend along so i they can sign up as well and i can compare on how the service works for both of us. The posters at the bank state that the service is only available for Netone and Telelcel lines , but my friend managed to sign up using an Econet line with no problems.
AIRTIME PURCHASE
Airtime purchase was a hit and miss . My Telecel line had no problems purchasing airtime for the line registered for mobile banking , but trying to credit another phone never worked . My friends Econet line received error messages or just cut out every time they tried to access the purchase airtime menu .
FUNDS TRANSFER
When you initially fill in the application form , there is a section that allows you to put down the details of individuals with a Standard Charted accounts whom you can transfer money to. I filled in this section of the form , but when my account was activated and i tried to use the service i got the message informing me i had not nominated anyone. My friends Econet line did show the people they had nominated but they had no luck in conducting an internal transfer
ACCOUNT PAYMENTS
I did not sign up for this service although my friend opted to signup for the Dstv account payment. We tried it on the Econet line and we got more error messages and were unable to pay or DStv account.
SMS ALERTS
Sms alerts for Deposits and Withdrawals on our accounts come in seconds just after the transactions .
Standard Charted’s Mobile banking services are very handy if you just want to check your balance and get real-time notifications of account activity. Value added services like account payments and internal transfers are very unreliable at best and mostly frustrating . The signup process is fairly straight forward but the one week wait and missing and skipped details make it a cumbersome exercise . At the time of writing no announcements have been made whether Standard Charted bank will integrate with Ecocash .
It will be interesting to see what effect integrating Ecocash with local banks will have on the mobile banking services that banks already offer.
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