2

Whenever I receive money in my bank account, I get an email saying:

If the transaction is not done by you, please contact our Helpline at the earliest.

enter image description here

The same warning is there on both debit transactions and credit transactions.

My first thought is that they designed the message for debit transactions and simply forgot to change it for credit transactions. But it's one of the largest banks in the country, and it seems like a somewhat silly mistake to make.

However, since credit transactions would often not be "done by you" (the customer), I don't think they would want me to contact them every time I receive money from someone. (Perhaps I should try it, haha.)

Maybe they mean "if you don't recognize the transaction" or something like that? Again, it's a big bank and such unclear language would seem strange.

Is there anything I'm missing about this message?

I emailed them about this weeks ago, but they didn't respond to the email.

As you can see from the screenshot, the name of the bank is "Karur Vyasya Bank."

Improve this question
4
  • Nope. There is no regulation for specific wording. It depends on how complex the stuff is.
    – Dheer
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 10:41
  • I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it can only be answered by the service provider.
    – Dheer
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 10:42
  • Even Citibank sends out an email mentioning so. So I presume every Indian bank does it, might be RBI regulations to keep people informed because of the numerous fraudulent transactions.
    – DumbCoder
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 7:56
  • @DumbCoder Citibank tells customers to contact them each time they receive money from anyone other than themselves?
    – Fiksdal
    Commented Sep 19, 2016 at 8:05

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

Yours is really an English question, in my opinion. Indeed, I would say that

If the transaction is not done by you, please contact our Helpline at the earliest.

is really a translation for a non-native English speaker to mean

If you don't recognize this transaction

Again, in my opinion, this seems a courtesy, a bank or any financial institution can offer their own menu of alerts. My bank will alert me when a new bill pay company or person is added (e.g. I add a company to my list of bills I'll pay from my account). I delete those as the pop up the second I load it, but if I ever saw one when I wasn't at my computer, I'd know I have an issue. Similar, I can get a text from my credit card if my balance is exceeding a certain level, a bill becoming overdue, etc.

Improve this answer
6
  • 1
    +1 And as an English question, this wording looks very specific to the type of grammatical fingerprint of an Indian person who has English as a second language. Both "is not done by you" and "at the earliest" are not typical of native English speakers, with the latter sounding a bit like British English influence. If I had to guess I'd say it was originally translated by an Indian citizen who learned English as a second language, and that the dialect is heavily influenced by British English (which makes historical/geographic sense) - and that it was intended to mean just what you thought.
    – BrianH
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 19:02
  • 2
    Much appreciated. I have great respect for people for whom English is a second language. When a Spanish-speaking person apologizes for their bad English, I always smile and say "your English is far better than my Spanish would ever be."
    – JTP - Apologise to Monica ♦
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 19:05
  • When you removed the screenshot from OP, was that because it contained no useful information that was not already present in the text of the post? IMO it might be useful to see the general layout and style of the message.
    – Fiksdal
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 19:26
  • Rolled back for you. I felt it didn't add any value, but if you do, then it's important it stay. No harm keeping it, you did a good job removing the numbers.
    – JTP - Apologise to Monica ♦
    Commented Sep 17, 2016 at 20:15
  • 1
    No problem - my SE app pings my phone so I see alerts instantly. In hindsight, I might have just clipped the image to lower half. To make it clear the answer is really independent of the bank, and it's a general question that can apply to any bank or credit card.
    – JTP - Apologise to Monica ♦
    Commented Sep 18, 2016 at 12:24

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .