ICICI Bank UK HiSAVE Savings Account

Everything's fine until you want to take your money out.

It seems you can't transfer money to any account that dosen't have a direct debit set up linking it with your HiSave. This is not only bizarre, but completely unnecessary, as no other bank has this ludicrous requirement.

Not only do ICICI take 6 days to tell you this, they take another 14 days to set up the direct debit (which has to be printed and sent "snail mail"). That's the best part of a month before you can even initiate a transfer out of your account. (absolutely no problems transferring money in of course, you just do that with the same simple money transfer mechanism they won't let you use to take money out...)

Every other bank of course lets you do a money transfer in a matter of minutes, just by entering the account details into a website screen.

This bank is just an embarrassment to the banking profession. What makes them think it's acceptale to make a customer wait nearly a month to complete a basic, simple money transfer is beyond me.

ICICI has a fully automated system which would be OK if it worked properly. The problem is that the system has defects, one of which is that it's so secure that bona-fide customers have severe problems. I know their interest rates are good, but my overall experience has been very poor and I wouldn't recommend the bank to anyone - do yourself a favour and give ICICI a miss.