Abidul Syrians suffers with banks in Hong Kong
Being Syrian in HongKong might suck just because of a small thing here. BANKS!! HSBC, Citibank, Standard Chartered, Public Bank, Bank of China, … to name a few. and believe me, I’ve been to a lot more than that.
Been to all of those and asked to open a saving account only, no loans, no nothing, and guess what was the Answer from all of them was?
Aaah, sorry! we can’t, bank policy.. What bank policy? We don’t open for Syrian Nationalities.
One of the stories
I went to HSBC (and Im mentioning HSBC story especially because they were super ignorant with their attitude) for getting a saving account, of course after the 3 times of going back and forth because each time he’d ask something from me to complete the papers I kept my patience, and then the last time we sat for almost an hour to apply for the account when I had all the papers already, at the end of the application, the employee would start a 20 mins questionnaire with you, some of the questions were:
- Will you use this account to transfer money back home?
- Will someone send you something from Syrian?
- Do you do any kind of business related transactions to Syria?
I mean come on! Anyways, he said it might take a while to get the account open, but after 2 weeks I got no call, no email no nothing. I thought maybe I should check with them, so, I went to HSBC office and guess what the same employee said after checking with back-office! “We’re sorry, your application was rejected.” I was like why didn’t you call at least so I would use that time to try other banks, he said: “oh! they didn’t call you, probably they will call you soon”. WOW! you can imagine that a call after that is super not useful to me, right!
At first, I took it all in and thought Ok! maybe big banks are very strict and avoid troubles. but, no! it was a lot more than just the big ones.
But, then I got super frustrated, since having a bank account was a need for me where I had to get that to get my salary. I tried a lot of other methods, don’t worry.
And of course, I didn’t want to shout or anything in the banks, because:
- First: the employee at the front has nothing to do with it.
- Second: you don’t want to prove to them that they did the right move by not allowing them to facilitate service for this nationality.
Yes, I know! me acting on it doesn’t mean that I’m doing it because of I’m Syrian but because I’m disrespected as a human being.
I mean for god sake, do you think that having a Syrian Passport is a nice joyful ride for us? so you’d come and add this restriction to us like that! I really don’t get it! I mean God gave me the blessing that I was able to leave Syria temporarily during the war that is happening and way luckier than others with such blesses, but that doesn’t mean if I’m disrespected out side my country then it’s ok! I know this isn’t a really positive kind of article, but mans has a limit!
Don’t get me wrong I love Hong Kong, it’s a great place, but I just find it hard to deal with banks.
Peace!