Don’t use ICICI Bank services for FASTag

After the use of FASTag was made mandatory for toll payments, several service providers came up with a proposal to provide the FASTag stickers including some banks. When the original date for introduction was set as December 15,2019, there was a rush for the purchase of the tags and Banks fixed a price of around Rs 500/- for the issue of the stickers.

ICICI Bank was one such Bank which offered the FASTag sticker at a price of Rs 499.12. The service was provided through the website of ICICI Bank and hence customers of ICICI Bank presumed that it was one of the ancillary services offered by the Bank and opted for it.

However, in the case of the undersigned it has been a bad experience with ICICI Bank, where after registering for the service on November 20 2019, specifically for the vehicle owned by the undersigned, the Bank and/or its service provider failed to provide the sticker within the one week period promised or until now.

When a subsequent Banking ombudsman complaint was raised after waiting for one month, the Bank is providing an excuse that the documents uploaded did not match the registered details but has failed to specifically indicate what is the difference.

The Bank is unable to say X was the data uploaded and Y was the data registered and S does not match with Y.

Instead, the Bank has been sending repeated replies on the twitter handle @ICICIcares that a team has been assigned and they would reply. It appears that the reply is being generated automatically by a robot and no sensible and responsible human executive is aware what is the dispute raised.

This is how AI and Chat robots are being used in a manner that it defeats the very purpose for which they are sought to be used. Even the onsite help of ICICI Bank is managed by a chat bot which is not configured to understand the queries of this nature and does not even escalate failed queries to human supervision.

ICICI Bank has allocated a relationship manager with an e-mail address @icicibank.com which does not receive e-mails from senders with external e-mail addresses such as gmail.

Overall, the dispute resolution practice of ICICI Bank is a demonstration of how the AI technology should not be used.

I have now demanded the cancellation of the transaction and filed a complaint with the Banking ombudsman.

I now await and see how RBI’s Ombudsman  responds to the complaint.

In the meantime, I would like Mr Nitin Ghadkari to reflect how his decisions are causing many problems to people and his failure to take responsibility for proper implementation is reflecting as a failure of the Modi Government. It is important that individual ministers of the Modi Government need to take responsibility for their decisions to ensure that they donot become enemies from within to the Modi Government by their irresponsible handling of decisions that affect the common man.

In the meantime I would like to advise members of public to avoid using ICICI Bank services for FASTag not only because the system must be having some bugs but more so because their grievance handling system is unacceptable.

I would not be comfortable to ignore the registration made with one vendor and buy the tag again from another vendor as this may keep duplicate FASTag stickers in use for the same vehicle number and facilitate fraudsters to use the sticker with a duplicate number plate and commit frauds.

I am sure that Mr Nitin Ghadkari has not considered the Frauds that can be committed if a FASTag is duplicated. I am not sure if the FASTag readers in tools verify the tag details independently with the reading of the number plate and identify if there is a difference.

I would like the transport department to confirm if all the RFID readers in the tolls that accept the FASTag are synchronized with a number plate reading system and raise alarms in real time when there is a difference.

Naavi