Money transfer from ICICIBank - exchange rates

I recently realized that ICICIBank publishes inflated exchange rates on its website. Yesterday I called their customer service to transfer some Canadian dollars and their own representative told me not to trust the exchange rates published on their website. The actual exchange rate offered is lower than the published rates. Therefore, please beware to take this into account the next time you transfer money to India through ICICIBank. Money2India.com is also maintained by the same bank.

I fully agree with you. I have just transfer money from UK and I feel cheated. The conversion tool shows higher exchange rate which is inline with the market (daily published in the paper) than the actual exchange rate applied, which is 4-5% lower.

I feel that got cheated by ICICI and their customer service does not want to hear anything but take your money away. NEVER USED ICICI for transferring money to anywhere to India.

This is what their standard message is....
Dear Mr. xxxxx,

Please note that against your tracking no. xxxxxx for USD 87,000, we received clear funds on Monday, October xx, xxxx and converted the same at 14:50:05 IST. The rate applicable for any amount in the remittance amount slab of USD 10000 to USD 99999 was INR 46.21. This was thus applied to your transaction amount as well.

The rates that you see on the website are indicative rates and the actual rate would depend upon the prevailing market rate at the time of conversion of the transaction amount. The actual rate might vary from the rates indicated, based on the intra-day movement of the market rates. The exact rate to be applied to any transaction can be determined only at the time of conversion. As you must be aware that exchange rate may change every minute, hence we only provide an indicative rate on Money2India website, so that our customers have an idea on where the exchange rates are moving.

We would like to inform you that the forex rates updated on the various sites are the interbank rates and the same are not applicable to retail remittance transactions (small value), the exchange rates applied for remittances by ICICI Bank are based on the market rates prevailing at the time of conversion of funds. Please note for retail transactions, each bank offers their own exchange rates which are different from the Interbank rates and ICICI Bank offer slab-wise exchange rates based on the amount of the remittance.
Sincerely,

xxxxx xx xxx
Customer Service Manager
ICICI Bank Limited




-----Original Message-----

I can't believe that you provided competitive rate compare to the other banks exchange rate when you say in your email " Also we assure you that you have not lost any amount on the exchange rate and is competitive compared to the other banks exchange rate."

If you can't believe, I have a solid proof that I can show you that I got much higher rate for the same amount transaction with other indian bank even higher than 46.21.

All I can say that ICICI WILL NOTE be my prefer bank for transferring money to india in future as I am completely dissatisfied with the rate I was given.

Thanks for all your effort but it is not satisfying me at all.

Not looking forward to work with ICICI

I will do my best to express my feeling to online community as soon as possible to let others aware of it.

xxxx xxx