When we were new in Qatar, we were scouting for a bank that can accomodate our banking needs especially for payroll account purposes. A legion of the banks here offer high levels of average maintaining balance, until we found out about the service by Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC). HSBC offered no (zero/nil) maintaining balance for employees of pre-determined employers, and our employer was one of them. So we grabbed that opportunity and eventually learned about its lousy service.

1. It is one of the slowest, if not the slowest internet banking site.
2. Its CSR presumes you know nothing, and I mean nothing, about internet banking. They won’t believe this and that error happened when you performed this and that transaction.
3. You can’t transfer QR 1,000 or more in a single transaction even to your another HSBC account. Even when paying your credit card bills online, you need to repeat the transfers if your bill reached QR 1,000.
4. Their system doesn’t recognize if you have already paid your credit card bill before the due date. They will autodebit your current account (except if you have nil balance) on the due date for the amount of the bill, even if you have paid it already in full prior to that day.
5. No real-time detail of credit card purchases. You still have to wait for your billing statement to examine the details of your credit card purchases.
6. More. I know there are more, but that I can’t remember them now. I’ll just have to update this or post in another entry in the future.