Rad­hi­ca Sookraj

Al­though there has been an in­crease in bank­ing mal­ware over the past two years, Sco­tia­bank has seen growth in its on­line bank­ing ser­vices, dis­trict gen­er­al man­ag­er Ro­ry Bick­harie told the T&T Guardian.In an in­ter­view fol­low­ing the of­fi­cial launch of Sco­tia's Pre­mi­um Bank­ing Cen­tre at High Street, San Fer­nan­do, Bick­harie said in­ter­net safe­guards al­low more fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tions to be done se­cure­ly on­line.

"I won't say that there is a dis­trust with on­line bank­ing. We have a di­verse gen­er­a­tion and peo­ple have be­come ac­cli­ma­tised to on­line bank­ing. There is a dis­tinct group who would not want to en­gage in it but the rate of on­line cus­tomers is grow­ing. More peo­ple are trust­ing tech­nol­o­gy and em­brac­ing the ef­fi­cien­cies that it cre­ates for them," he said.

"We have won the top In­ter­net bank plat­forms for con­sec­u­tive years. We have tech­nol­o­gy backed by our in­ter­na­tion­al par­ent bank in Cana­da, so these plat­forms are pret­ty safe with­in Sco­tia­bank."Through the Pre­mi­um Bank­ing Cen­tre, re­tail cus­tomers will be able to ac­cess pri­vate bank­ing ser­vices and en­joy a range of fa­cil­i­ties in­clud­ing a des­ig­nat­ed lounge, des­ig­nat­ed park­ing, a pri­vate at­ten­dant and a pre­mi­um cred­it card which al­lows ac­cess to 600 air­ports across the world.

"It's all about cus­tomer ser­vice and putting the cus­tomer first. We try to build a re­la­tion­ship through good times and bad times," Bick­harie said.He said any­one can ap­ply to be a pre­mi­um cus­tomer."Once the client meets the re­quire­ments and the pre­mi­um bank­ing of­fer meets that per­sons needs we will en­ter­tain the re­quest," he said, adding that the ser­vices are geared at as­sist­ing young pro­fes­sion­als and busi­ness peo­ple who do not have time to stand in line.

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Anya Schnoor al­so en­cour­aged cus­tomers to ap­ply for the ser­vice to get ac­cess to a ded­i­cat­ed pre­mi­um bank­ing of­fi­cer who will pro­vide fi­nan­cial ad­vice.Guests at the launch in­clud­ed San Fer­nan­do May­or Kaz­im Ho­sein and in­de­pen­dent can­di­date for San Fer­nan­do West Jow­elle De Souza.