Dr Cheah Soon Hai said that lately there has been a lot of feedbacks and complains from the society especially housewives, pensioners and small traders that they have been misguided by the bank sales officers into purchasing bank products which they did not intend to buy.

He said, nowadays, the savings services are merely a small part of the banking system, the new trends seems to indicate that banks nowadays are encouraging investments more than savings.

Dr Cheah Soon Hai said, based on the feedbacks he received, normally the scenario happens when a person has an amount of money, say RM10,000 which he wants to save as Fixed Deposit in the bank, however, instead of accepting the customer’s request, the bank sales officer counter proposed to the customer to buy the investment fund of the bank. Usually this is done with a lot of tempting persuasions and vague projections. Under such circumstances, this group of people who do not completely understand what exactly the banking product was about were persuaded into putting their money in the investment fund.

He said, when the investment fund reaches its maturity date, there are instances where customers were shocked to see that their return was much lesser compared to the return they would earn if they had placed the money in a Fixed Deposit account. There are worse cases where the customers were left with only a small amount of money in the account due to market fluctuation.

Dr Cheah finds it unfair for the bank officers to unduly influence the customers this way, the money are the hard earned money of the people and yet it was left to be lost in such a manner. Dr Cheah also added that, undeniably the customers agreed to buy the product and signed the agreements, however being a group which are less informed, it is possible that they agreed upon misrepresentation and
undue influence by the bank officers.

To put a stop to such unwanted incidence, Dr Cheah urged Bank Negara to monitor the sales operation of the banks to ensure that customers are not misrepresented by the sales officers in the bank. It is alright for the sales officers to do sales for potential prospects, however, in a manner where the potential customer is made fully aware of the risks of investing in the investment fund. Secondly, the sales personnel should not influence the customers into diverging from their initial decision by hard selling the products. Bank Negara may also make a regulation which sets out the guidelines for the sales operation in banks.

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