May 20 2011 Turkish Bank Charges Review

In this article, we set out to identify the basic charges and fees for 13 Turkish banks. In researching this we also reviewed their ability to answer simple questions via email or phone.

The questions:

Each of the 13 banks were asked the following questions (in English) via email and via a phone call to their national help line number.

Do you offer a Telephone service in English?
Do you offer a Internet Banking in English?
Is there a monthly charge for your basic debit account?
Is there a monthly charge to receive statements (via post)?
What is the fee to make a simple transfer payment to another account at the same bank? (e.g. Garanti to Garanti)
What is the fee to make an EFT payment to another (Turkish) bank? (e.g. Garanti to TEB)
Is there a fee to withdraw money from another bank's ATM (in Turkey)?

Email responses:

We first sent an identical email (or web enquiry), asking for answers to the above questions. Once we received their replies we rated the quality of the reply, the response time, and the accuracy of the answers provided.

Of the 13 banks;

THREE managed a satisfactory attempt at answering the questions.
TWO replied with very basic information (e.g. answered one question, or suggested a visit to the branch).
FIVE managed only a standard courtesy "thank your for your email" message.
THREE banks failed to reply at all.

Phone responses:

Next, we called each of the banks' advertised national phone numbers and asked the same questions. We also timed the call - both the time taken to speak to a representative, and the total time of the call. We reviewed the answers and rated our satisfaction of the overall call. We were quite surprised by the results; not only did we often struggle to navigate automated menus, or to get through to an English speaking representative, but we generally found that most representatives were baffled and confused at the concept of answering some of the simplest questions. Having said that, as a stark contrast to phone-banking in other countries, it was common that we were speaking to an English speaking operative within 30 seconds of dialing the number. Very impressive.

Of the 13 banks;

SEVEN managed a satisfactory attempt at answering the questions.
FOUR offered poor answers and struggled.
TWO banks failed miserably to provide an easy route to speak to an English speaking representative, or failed to answer the phone within 5 minutes.

Annual Account (Maintenance) Charges

A core goal of this report was to provide insight into which banks charge an annual fee for having an account with them. We found great variance in the annual fees; from 44 TL all the way up to a huge 120 TL. Within the scope of this report we did not investigate whether the bank asking for 120TL offered anything different from the bank asking for 44 TL per year. The biggest thing we found is that

Of the 13 banks;

SIX banks had an annual charge which could be avoided if you have automatic payments associated with the account.
FOUR banks had a fixed annual charge
THREE banks were not able to provide information regarding annual account charges