Ok I live in a remote place and 1 mnth back I deposited my check in Sbi branch different from the one where I have opened one. and now today my Check returned to the bank and they told me that you cannot deposit the check from SBI branch other than your home branch where you opened your account.. Now can anyone tell me what happened there . and Is it so??
This is a gaming of the system by the banks, there is no such rules as such, but this is a usual practice played around to unsuspecting customers, this is nothing but holding your funds, Citibank is the issuer of cheques for Google and they return the cheques to collecting branches without assigning any reason, this is a ploy to hold funds for long, i experienced this and took my branch manager to task, threaten them that you will file a complain with 'Banking Ombudsman' search google and you will see what i am talking about, they fear that authority because you might even end up getting compensation from them if you have gone through mental agony, my branch manager had send back the cheques twice to Citibank asking for assigning the specific reasons for returning, and then BHAM! the cheque is cleared, they do not do this practice in cities or metros as you can walk into any Citibank branch or you have the wherewithal to take them to task, they do it for rural areas with disdain, as they know it might take sometimes and pain for you to take them to task. Well, don't panic, complain to the appropriate banking authority in your area and you should be good. I don't know how many others here know about it, but Citibank intentionally delays cheques in clearance, my idea, they just do it to keep funds for long in their balance.
Possibly the branch doesn't have core banking facility. Go to SBI's site and check if that branch and the branch with which you have an account have core banking.
No offense but there has never such a rule AFAIK. I have deposited all over India when I am away from my place etc. but everytime it has cleared. There is no such rule at least not in normal banks. SBI is perhaps abnormal in that sense. And maybe that is the reason I have never used SBI though I have accounts in most other banks. Whenver I enter an SBI branch or for that matter any other such govt. affiliated banks, I hate the commotion and indiscipline going on. The customer service never seems to work properly and nobody seems to be a priority customer there. The only good thing about SBI is that they have the least minimum balance of only a thousand bucks if I am not wrong. But then it also means every xyz opens account in SBI and so their workload and hence the indiscipline gets even more. Personally speaking, I have found ICICI, HDFC and Axis to be the best Indian banks. Citibank and Standard Chartered are also good but their minimum balance of 25K bucks seems a bit on the heavier side. But then you always get priority in these two banks as there are hardly many customers there. For the other banks once you become a priority customer they do not take much time for your work to get done. @OP dont you have any other account in any of the other banks I mentioned. It would be handled a lot better in those banks for sure.