Data from the Banking Ombudsman has revealed complaints that flooded Gabriel Maotwanyane’s office ranged from customers who defaulted on their loans to those who lost their properties after being retrenched.
The Office of the Banking Ombudsman was established by the Bankers Association of Botswana in 2002 to investigate and mediate customer complaints against commercial banks.
According to Maotwanyane, complaints involving mortgage loans topped the list of issues handled by his office last year.
“I normally advise people to always approach banks when they know they are about to sink and ask them to give them permission to sell the house as this can minimise the cost unlike when the bank does it on your behalf,” he told BusinessWeek in an interview. “People usually come to us when it is late. “When a judgment is before the courts, there is nothing we can do.”
The Banking Ombudsman said in the case of retrenchment, customers should always ask their banks to re-schedule loans where possible.
Statistics Botswana estimates that nearly 70,000 people lost jobs or businesses due to COVID-19 in 2020 alone, as the economy sank to its worst performance since Independence, weighed down by local border closures as well as global travel bans and movement restrictions.
“As a country, we need to address issues around financial difficulty and how we support those affected because at the moment it is not coming out clearly,” Maotwanyane said. “Following COVID-19 there were serious challenges, where people defaulted and got listed with credit bureaux, while some were retrenched, and others decided to abandon the loans. “All these were the contributing factors to the higher numbers of complaints about loans,” he said.
He said other complaints included alleged fraud as well as identity theft where the Office of the Banking Ombudsman recorded five cases of customers who had been swindled by people close to them. A growing trend of transactional fraud was also picked, where seven customers came forward to report that they had been robbed of their money after giving out their banking details to strangers who convinced them they had won competitions.
“There is another case where a customer had four accounts with the bank and the bank automatically linked them through internet banking without getting consent from the owner. “The customer was scammed money online from one account and this resulted in them losing money in all the accounts because they were linked,” he said.
Other complaints focused on credit insurance, where five complaints were received regarding personal loan coverage. In these cases, people gave out false information when filing the credit life forms and when they wanted to claim, the insurance companies took time conducting their own investigations before paying out. “We received cases where the insurance company failed to pay the customer because the information the customer gave out was totally different from what had been collected from their doctors. “I advise people to always provide the correct information to avoid such incidents,” he said.
