Customer Rights Protection
ALEXBANK pays great attention to all its valued customers/potential customers and is keen to ensure that the data and information that help them to select the required products and services are located on the bank's website with the utmost credibility and transparency in light of the instructions regulating the banking sector in this regard. Intesa Sanpaolo Group, being ALEXBANK's parent company, plays a crucial role in ensuring that customers’ rights are upheld through adopting a vibrant methodology that aims at promoting comprehensive policies and procedures to support sustainable business development built on trust, loyalty, and ethical practices.
Customer Rights Protection:
The Centeral Bank of Egypt (CBE) aims at establishing the best practices in customers’ rights equal to those that apply a clear framework that regulates the relationship between banks and service users to ensure equity, transparency, and data protection, including introducing a free mechanism for dealing with complaints and enhancing banking awareness to help customers select the right decisions.
Thus, the first issued regulation pertaining to customer rights protection in 2019 set the platform for dealing with customers in equity, justice, transparency, and disclosure.
The new complementary instructions issued in 2024 are establishing a regulatory framework for handling customers/potential customers complaints in banks and providing an effective, fair, transparent, and independent mechanism for complaint resolution in a manner that improves services provided and promotes customers’ trust in the banking system, as well as bolstering competition and increasing financial inclusion.
The Customer Rights Protection Office is an independent office that is responsible for ensuring that banks’ services and products comply with the rules and regulations in this concern and is also responsible for the management of complaints.
ALEXBANK ensures, by reviewing the contractual & precontractual documents, that the design and pricing of products and services, fully comply with the principles of transparency and disclosure, and that the services submitted to the customers contemplate their segments (education level, geographical distribution and age) and their financial abilities according to their income (to meet their financial obligations: installments, commissions and any additional fees).
Attention is given to the needs of the elderly, and the differently abled.
The Customer Rights Protection Office ensures that service providers and their agents/representatives, directly or indirectly offering products and services on behalf of the bank apply the values of equity and transparency in dealing with customers.
ALEXBANK ensures that all the customers/potential customers should be dealt with upon the principles of:
- Equity
- Justice
- Professionalism
- Nondiscrimination
- Credibility
- Transparency
ALEXBANK ensures that the bank's employees, service providers and their agents / representatives provide support to customers in selecting the products or services that suit their needs & their financial abilities. ALEXBANK confirms that it is upon the right of the customers to be given back any original documents submitted at the time of requesting the product or service in case of the bank's inability to respond to their requests.
ALEXBANK ensures that the bank, payment service providers, agents, and outsourcing services shall use contracts/forms that are equitable, uncomplicated, readable and clear, and explicitly describe the rights and obligations of the bank's service providers, customers, and all the conditions and features of the product or service being offered in a simplified formal language, avoiding complicated banking terms. Including all the data that preserves the rights of both the bank and the customers.
ALEXBANK ensures the disclosure and transparency of the actual annual interest rates and service rates, via all the bank’s and service providers’ available channels in a simple, understandable & comprehensive mechanism, avoiding any vague terms or conditions.
ALEXBANK ensures the diffusion of banking culture & awareness and ensures that all bank’s staff are fully aware of the rules and principles which preserves customer rights protection and that the bank’s customers/potential customers are also aware of banking services and products via issuing simplified informative bulletins and communications, explaining explicitly their rights & duties & clarifying the importance of reading contracts to avoid any misunderstanding from their side.
ALEXBANK ensures that the customers are aware of frauds and forgeries to which their accounts may be exposed and how to deal with this problem & the importance of preserving their confidential data and not sharing any personal information to any other party about their own accounts.
ALEXBANK organizes training programs to employees on the Consumer Protection Rules, following up on the application of such rules in an ongoing and effective manner, rendering banking products and services as well as assessing their adequacy for satisfying the customer’s needs and resulting obligations.
Customer Complaints Management Mechanism:
ALEXBANK ensures an organized mechanism regarding handling complaints for customers/potential customers and ensures that the bank’s services and products comply with the rules and regulations established in this regard.
If you have a complaint, you can follow the below steps:
We seek to provide a better service, so if you wish to submit any complaints regarding any of the services or products provided by the bank or any of its employees or the procedures followed by the bank, ALEXBANK provides a free service to receive complaints and follow them up at all stages, and therefore, we are ready to receive your complaints throughout any of the following channels:
- Contacting the Contact Center on 19033 for Mass & Small Business customers & 19044 for Magnifica & Private customers.
- You can visit the bank’s website www.alexbank.com to register your complaints.
- Send an email with your complaint on customer_support@alexbank.com
- Visit the nearest bank branch and fill out the complaint form and hand it over to the customer service officer.
- Visit the Customer Rights Protection office to file a written complaint.
- ALEXBANK’s Social Media platforms.
Illiterate or differently abled customers can receive support through a trustee from their side or from the branch's side to help in writing their complaint, especially in case of visual loss.
In all cases, the below points will be considered:
- In the event that you submit a complaint that lacks the minimum data necessary for the examination, the bank agent will contact you to complete the required data to complete the proper investigation.
- Within a maximum of two working days from the date of the complaint's registration, the complainant will receive a reference number along with the necessary time to examine the complaint.
- The complainant must preserve the complaint reference number through which he/she can follow up by calling the call center on the unified line number 19033.
- The complaint will be answered by a maximum of 15 working days from the date of the complaint's receipt, including the reasons, justifications and possible solutions to end the subject of the complaint.
- In the case that the complaint is related to external service providers, the examination of the complaint may take more than 15 working days, so the complainant can contact the call center to the stages of his/her complaint investigation.
- The bank may refer all or part of the complaint to another bank, if the subject of the complaint falls under the total or joint liability with that bank.
- In case the complainant submits an objection to the response of the bank upon complaint, he/she must refer to the bank and notify the bank in writing within 15 working days maximum from the date of receiving the response from the bank, accompanied by the necessary justifications for the re-examination.
- Failure to object within this identified period is not considered as an acceptance of the bank's response sent to you.
- In case of submitting an objection to the bank first investigation, the bank's representatives will provide he/she with the same reference number of the original complaint along with the date of submission within two working days from the date of registration of the objection.
- The bank will reinvestigate the complaint in case of receiving his/her objection to the bank's response within the specified period and a final response to the objection within 15 working days from the date of receipt of the notification.
In any case, customers should revert to the bank first and wait for the bank's response before submitting any complaint to the Central Bank of Egypt.