More tales of woe from HSBC's small-business clients
Retail banking clients of HSBC are not the only ones complaining of increases in fees for allegedly enhanced services. Small businesses also have their grievances.
We received a letter from one reader who says he was urgently summoned to a meeting with someone in HSBC Commercial Banking to discuss increasing his company's fully secured HK$200,000 overdraft.
Having explained that he did not want to increase it, he was then told by the man from the bank that HSBC would be happy to extend the overdraft for another year but the fee would be raised from the HK$2,000 he paid in 2009 to HK$5,000 - a jump of 150 per cent.
The reason given for this was not the usual 'enhanced service' guff but 'higher operational costs'.
Our reader suspects that account managers were given increased revenue targets to hit per account either by selling clients additional services or increasing the fees for existing services.