The Reserve Bank of India keeps revising the Banking Ombudsman Scheme to enlarge the scope for customer complaints on new areas, such as deficiencies in providing the promised services, credit card complaints, levying service charges without prior notice to the customer, and non-adherence to the fair practices code as adopted by individual banks.

Complaints can be raised about any inordinate delay in payments or non-payment, collection of cheques towards bills, remittances by banks, and non-acceptance coins and small denomination notes or charging of commission.

Hence, if you are not satisfied with your bank’s grievance redressal process, you can lodge a complaint with the banking ombudsman. Under the Banking Ombudsman Scheme, complainants can file their complaints in any form, including online. For filing such a complaint, you need to follow a certain process.

Find out how you can file a complaint under the banking ombudsman scheme:

  1. Firstly you need to file a complaint with your own bank, before approaching the banking ombudsman offices (BO).
  2. After lodging a complaint with your bank, if you don’t receive a response within 30 days or even if you are not satisfied with the response, you can take it ahead with the ombudsman. The complaint with the banking ombudsman needs to raised within a year of receiving a reply from the bank.
  3. You need to lodge the complaint to the banking ombudsman within the same jurisdiction the branch or office of the bank is located.
  4. For centralized related operations or card-related complaints, the billing address is determined by the jurisdiction of the banking ombudsman.
  5. You can also submit a written complaint. Relevant details like name, address, explanation, and facts around the complaint, the loss suffered and the relief sought needs to be filled. You can download, fill up the form available on http://www.bankingombudsman.rbi.org.in.
  6. Along with the complaint form, you can also submit photocopies of documents supporting your case.
  7. To file a complaint online you can visit https://secweb.rbi.org.in/BO/precompltindex.htm
  8. After receiving your complaint, the banking ombudsman will examine the case and make a settlement between the bank and the customer, or by passing an award.
  9. If you are still not satisfied with the ombudsman’s order, you can take your complaint to the consumer courts.