After a personal visit to the local SBI branch and a couple of hours ooga-booga with SMS and email OTPs on janky data roaming for US phone, I’ve finally restored my online access to indian bank account. Indian banking bureaucracy has way more advanced bugginess than US
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They had both my mobile number wrong (profile had US number but with India country code) and email wrong (.ocm instead of .com) and 2 years ago they forced a mandatory password update that needed an OTP I couldn’t get so got locked out for 2 years till I could fix it in person
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Also 🤞if all goes well I may have managed my first ever INR to USD remittance from my NRO account (non-resident account in INR). Major pain. Process, in case anyone else is in same boat…
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…need to get an auditor to file tax forms CA15/CB15, take proof to local branch, then take the letter they give you to main branch able to do forex SWIFT tx, fill out another form there with swift info. Then assuming your SMS is setup right wait for debit alert.
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Oh and to fix all my online issues I needed special override codes from bank… since the issues were with standard 2FA.
Still a couple of residual janky things but I think I’m set.
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On the plus side, staff at both personal banking branch and forex desk at main branch were incredibly nice and helpful. Possibly because NRI accounts tend to be large in local INR terms (current rate is 80 INR to the USD). I merit concierge banking service here.
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Oh and at one point I had to call the woman who helped me in person because turns out there are passwords online — for main account access and profile update. I’d previously tried calling from the US and didn’t get through but this time I did, possibly luck or local call effect
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The staff also work in some sort of quantum entanglement. The 4-5 service desk staff can do a lot more than lowly tellers but they do it entangled with each other and processing 2-3 people and 1-2 phone conversations at once. Your thing inches forward each time it gets attention
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A sort of cloud of commingled paperwork streams and computer screens heads towards serialized wave function collapse of individual customer cases, with constant coordination chatter in Tamil which I couldn’t follow closely. Kinda impressive.
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High-end bureaucracy isn’t the factory-like retail bureaucracy of queues and user-hostile mechanical processing
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