The thought of no banks around you may just scare you to your bones. If you had no bank accounts, no debit cards or cheque books, you would have to carry all your money by yourself. And it’s pretty risky! But that is something we need not worry about as we have it all. Today as the saying goes,” We are spoilt for choices.” There are numerous banks that lure us into selling their accounts.
Types of bank accounts
Banks in this century offer different types of accounts like savings bank account, current account, loan account, overdraft account, investment account, deposit account… and the list goes on. I will only focus on the current account today.
Current Account
Let me tell you what a current account is. It is a transactional account opened for businesses (non-individuals). These accounts help businesses to collect payments from their customers and alternately make payments to their vendors.
Below are certain things to consider when opening a current account:
Bank
The bank you choose is the most important parameter here. Safety of your money is what that counts. There make sure that the bank you approach to has a very good reputation.
Overdraft Facility
It is mostly seen that, small businesses always fall short of working capital and approach their bank to support them at reasonable interest rates.
Online Banking Facility
With Internet touching every sphere of lives, online banking came into existence. Today, you’ll hardly find an office without computers and internet connection. A few of the perks provided by this service is account balance, transferring funds, paying taxes and other normal banking services. This factor is most taken into consideration today.
Phone Banking Facility
Through phone banking you are able to transact on your account over phone. Though useful, automated answering machines making you hold the line for hours before you can talk to an actual person takes the zeal out of you. Nevertheless, it is good too.
Mobile Banking Facility
Again certain banks have also come up with this idea of downloadable apps on mobile phones. With these apps, multitude of banking transactions is allowed over the phone. Since it is new, the app is not very stable and highly unreliable.
Network
Number of branches and ATMs
Charges
Almost all banks offer more or less the same facilities. In such a scenario, it is the charges they charge that distinguishes them. It is thus advised to evaluate the quality and quantity of services the bank provides before giving the final heads up.
With these parameters in mind for evaluating banks for their current account offering we have come across the following banks and hence will be able to review these only:
- Citibank
- HSBC
- ICICI Bank
- HDFC Bank
- IDBI Bank
- Bank of India
- SBI
When it comes to charging, it is seen that multinational banks are more expensive. But, their services do not even match their charges. It is only the feeling of exclusivity and status that they provide. These banks have poor value for money.
Bank of India is good as a nationalized bank. They have minimum account balance requirement, all the modern banking facilities, really low charges and a warm personal touch missing in most of the private banks.
In the list of private Indian bank, ICICI and HDFC are found neck to neck. Both are almost equal in terms of services offered, charges and other parameters. What-so-ever, HDFC wins over ICICI in terms of sheer number of branches and ATMs. Thus the reach of this bank is high.
When we compare Bank of India and HDFC the only difference we find is that HDFC is very well integrated with all merchant establishments and payment gateways. But it lacks in the personal touch which is well provided by Bank of India.
But as a whole, we have to declare HDFC Bank as the winner in India.
As we have already mentioned, this result is from the fixed list of banks that we have compared. We have clearly missed out on a number of banks. If you have any other bank in mind, do share with us your thoughts.
Akshay Agarwal
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