ATM and Online Banking makes the life easy for customers. At the same time it saves a lot of time and resources of bank. It is like mutually benefited. Federal Bank was one of the few private sector banks which made the move long back itself – with a large number of ATMs and also by bringing up online banking. Things were all nice till last month when they decided to charge for the convenience ! Now when a user make an online payment (just money transfer, both the receiver and the sender need to pay INR 28.00 to the bank as transaction fee). That is a total of INR 56.00 (USD 1.3). Yes, it is not a big deal, but think about the other side. When a bank introduce more ATMs or online banking, it help them keep a lot of customers away from the bank. I mean customers need not come to the bank to withdraw money and they need not come to the bank for fund transfer. Bank saves a lot in resources. I do not know what made Federal Bank to take this wrong decision of charging customers for online transactions.

Not all customers will be happy with this change. Result ? More and more people will re-think on online banking, and people may go back to bank for transactions. Who will lose ? Federal Bank – no doubt in that.Forcing people to pay extra for online transactions is like taking them back to the pen and paper era. (This is not same as charging for services like online train ticket booking, which is a totally different matter). I use online banking service of HDFC Bank, SBI and Corporation Bank. And I have friends who use online banking of Axis (UTI) Bank, ICICI Bank and many other banks. None of these charge extra for fund transfer, then why my dear Federal Bank ?