Time to avoid ICICIDirect.com for stock investments
It seems like that folks behind one of India’s largest online brokerage house ICICIDirect.com have no clue about SLA and BCP terms for their site because thousands of their clients banged their heads on walls on Thursday, 8th July 2010 when the site remains unavailable for more than 24 hours. No explanation, no update during downtime and no prior notice to clients. Its always possible that sites can have technical glitches/issues and not working for a short period is understandable, but if the downtime stretch for hours and hours without any notice/updates in meantime clearly shows how much they care for their customers and a system where people are likely to have lost crores of rupees has to be accountable.
Moreover this is not the only case where their site is unresponsive, even it is one of most basic and unrefined website, it is quite unstable since long time. Slow response in market hours and unavailability of various sections of sites from time to time are another addition to their bad reputation with a fact that they are most expensive online brokerage house in market.
I’m not a frequent trader and didn’t affected except viewing my portfolio for a while but folks who are frequent in stocks have suffered badly. If you think, you can do the trading via phone by calling their representative, no way; their phone-order facility was also broken at that time as reported by various reports on sites (though I didn’t checked that). Check one of such report here. Most amusing thing is that such a big incident where thousands of customer affected directly was missing from media coverage, at least I didn’t find any big story in news papers or TV news channels.
I preferred ICICIDirect.com by the fact that all of my accounts like saving, credit card, demat are with ICICI and I don’t mind paying bit higher brokerage because I trade only once in a while but now after such incidents, I’ve already moved by MF portfolio to HDFC and now looking for good site to move equity also. Kotak, HDFC Securities and Sharekhan are on my radar for this purpose. Let me know, if you have good experience with any.
I agree Jagbir, that there is no accountability here. Lakhs of customers were stranded unable to trade and not a word of apology from the bank. I wish SEBI would put some norms in place and penalise them for not providing service and make them refund the annual charges.
There you are,Dont you think their “Kahayal Aapka” ad is ridiculous? even if the spend a min to think about customer and the customer service rather than spending crores on “Khayal Aaapka ” things will be easy for Customers. I am also an unfortunate Demat accnt holder with ICICI and looking out for better Service provider. I got lot of recommendation for Kotak from my friends.
Please publish when you decide on some demat service provider..
Thanks srini, you are right, rather then spending crores on ads, if they invest more in tech side to make their site stable, that will help more to them. Ironically, they are the most expensive broker, they deserved to be dumped by customers now.
For MF investments, I strongly suggest HDFC as they charge flat Rs. 100 quarterly fee irrespective of no. of SIPs/Investment in MFs. For equity, will definitely publish here when I make a decision.
Yah, Pravin, there’s no accountability, SEBI must take some action against them, I hope somebody have complained to SEBI for this incident.
Jagbir
I totally agree with you Srini, today is an era of Branding and ICICI spends so much in doing 360 degree communication this was certainly not expected out of them what happened on 8th July. I also have an account with Kotak Securities. It’s been quite a while that am dealing with them and haven’t had any complaints so far. Just check this http://www.kotaksecurities.com/accountsection/index.html , am sure it will be of great help to you.