OFBank inundated with complaints

Overseas Filipino Bank, or OFBank, the country's first government digital bank and a subsidiary of the Land Bank of the Philippines, has been the subject of several complaints recently about erroneous and delayed transactions and unresponsive customer service.                                

The complaints expressed on social media posts were tackled in an episode of DAILY TRIBUNE's digital show Usapang OFW on Tuesday. 

The posts were shared in the Facebook group named Overseas Filipino Bank (OFBank).

One OFBank client said she experienced a long wait for the one-time PIN to complete a financial transaction. She said she had to request at least five times for a PIN as it kept expiring due to the delay in sending the PIN to the user.

As a result, the client was blocked from transacting further due to "excessive" requests for a PIN.

The client said she had been using OFBank services for five years until the recent problems.

The client attempted to contact the digital bank's customer service through the phone, which caused her a further headache as no one was picking up.

"I have a business to take care of, and this problem is wasting my time and money. Do they think overseas Filipino workers simply defecate money? All I could hear were advertisements over the phone," the exasperated client said in Filipino on a Facebook post shared two days ago.

Delayed transfers

Similarly, two clients complained of delayed fund transfers and deposits to OFBank and sought explanations through Facebook messages posted seven days ago.

"Have you received your money sent to OFBank? How long would it take?" one of them asked fellow OFBank clients in Filipino.

Another client shared that she lost some funds in her digital account despite not making any payments using her physical card or an online app.

She posted her complaint on Facebook on 30 October and asked how to retrieve the deducted amounts.

"Have you experienced fund deductions from local payments even though you did not use a card or an online payment method?" the client also said in Filipino.

Faulty deductions were also experienced by another client using her ATM card. "The amount deducted from me was doubled after the machine initially declined the transaction. I hope others will become aware that this problem can happen," the client said.

Although she could retrieve her funds, she said the bank took too long, up to 45 days, to fix the problem. "Check your fund balance each time you have a transaction," she advised.

Yet another client said she could not log onto her account as the "log in" button was unclickable, following an app update.

EO 44

The DAILY TRIBUNE reached out to OFBank's parent company, the Land Bank of the Philippines or LandBank, through email and phone calls, but it failed to reply as of press time.

OFBank was created in 2017 through Executive Order 44 to cater to the needs of overseas Filipino workers and their families or beneficiaries.

The digital bank has at least 20,000 deposit accounts and serves clients in 112 countries.

OFBank offers deposits, loans, fund transfers, bills payments, and investments through retail government bonds.

LandBank reported its total digital transaction value surged by 30 percent to P735.95 billion in the first quarter from 41.2 million transactions.

In its first quarter report, LandBank said four million digital accounts had been opened using the LandBank Digital Onboarding System since 2018. It added that these accounts include those owned by OFBank clients.