High transaction fees and poor customer service from business banks frustrate entrepreneurs

What cheeses off entrepreneurs the most about business banks in Singapore? To find out, we did an informal poll on Facebook and got some answers: a huge chunk highlighted cost transaction fees as a bugbear, while poor service attitude and slow response times received a lot of enthusiastic nods.

We got a hint of these concerns from another group of entrepreneurs we surveyed a while ago. Many of them have been held back by long waiting times and queries that went buried. My own experience with UOB wasn’t ecstasy either. I attempted to contact them an entire Friday afternoon, and they virtually ignored me.

For overworked entrepreneurs who don’t have a lot of time to waste, such service standards are unacceptable. So I spoke to a few more entrepreneurs to find out what they have to say. Their responses below. Read more

OCBC bank most popular among S’pore start-ups, but it’s probably not the best

In Singapore, it looks like OCBC is the most popular bank among start-up entrepreneurs for creating a business account. That is the result of a poll SGE did on Facebook and LinkedIn in which 127 entrepreneurs responded.

Here’s what we asked them: “As a start-up founder in Singapore, which bank do you go to and set up your local account?”

Actually, OCBC is the leading bank by a mile at 45 percent of the respondents. The others, DBS (17 percent), UOB (15 percent), and Standard Chartered (13 percent), were not even close.

With such a yawning gap, it’s easy to assume that OCBC is the best choice for every entrepreneur — but that’s not necessary the case. To find out more, we dug a little deeper, speaking to entrepreneurs and comparing the different banks ourselves. Read more