By Mustapha Sesay
The Pan-African bank, Ecobank Sierra Leone Ltd, has defended itself from accusations of poor service delivery.
The bank last week came under attack from a group of junior staffers from the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences (COMAHS) who claimed they were unfairly treated by the bank which held on to their salaries for too long.
An ugly scene erupted at the bank’s head office on Charlotte Street in Freetown where the aggrieved customers had gone to collect their salaries. They refused to leave the banking hall unless they received their monies. They said the payment process had taken longer than anticipated.
One of them, Morrie Koroma, said for over a year now they had been encountering constant delay when it came to payment of their salaries by Ecobank. He said their colleagues who were with other banks always received theirs on time.
“For all the other banks they have paid and it is the same day they sent the cheques; but for us it is a different story every day we come for our salaries,” Koroma said.
“They will tell us the money has not entered the computer and we don’t know what will happen next. All our colleagues have received their salaries and we have cross checked with the college and they told us that they sent the cheques,” Koroma narrated to this reporter.
“We have bills to pay and families to take care of. I have to give lunch to my children. I do all of this out of the salary I receive. But image it, it’s almost one week now and I have not received my salary. What will I tell my wife if I have not given her money for food?”
Ecobank said the fault was not entirely theirs. An official explained that the process involved several technicalities which sometimes lead to the delay.
Augustine Sankoh, Client Manager at Ecobank, told Politico that sometimes they received hard copy of payment vouchers and that matching the names with account numbers and the swift codes often take time.
And there is every need to do proper verification before they can release salaries in order to avoid errors, he said.
Sankoh said if the soft copy of the vouchers were made available to them it would make the process easier in matching the names and the account numbers electronically. He said in most cases the soft copies were not available and they had huge number entries to deal with.
“Most times they send us hard copy, and in this hard copies most times either the account numbers or the swift codes are not correct. So what we do is we allow those that are correct to go and keep those that are not correct, pending further investigation.”
The Ecobank official said despite the complaints of the COMAHS staff, they were paid on the very day (last Friday) they protested. He said because the bank always regarded its customers as “kings”, they were seriously working on plans to make it more customer friendly and to ensure that the right attitude were obtained when customers feel dissatisfied with their services. He said the bank had adequate technology to address some of the basic demands of customers that would save time.
Sankoh also blamed customers’ attitude for the delay. He said customers could check their balance from any EcoBank ATM machine in various locations without going to the Bank and even receive their salaries from same. But people seldom use the system, he said.
(C) Politico 12/05/16
