Tan Kin Lian's Blog: Marketing of personal loans by banks

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Marketing of personal loans by banks

I received two calls on my mobile phone for marketing people of the banks selling their personal loans. I told them that they are not allowed to call my mobile phone for their marketing of their products. It is terrible that the marketing people can disturb the public in this manner. Don't we have some ethics and respect for people's privacy? I don't know why our banks now behave in this despicable manner, and why the authority stand by and allow these type of practices to continue without restraint.

Tan Kin Lian

NOTE
I receive marketing information by e-mail regularly I do not object to this mode of marketing. I can delete off the materials. But, marketing by mobile phone is objectionable and is an invasion of privacy. I hope that our MPs know the difference between what is acceptable and what is not and they have time, within the busy schedule and multiple duties, to do their duty as MPs.

3 comments:

rex said...: rex comments as follows,
actually sometimes we could be victims of our own actions. when we download great apps on android, or when we download freebies on internet, or we take part in a survey for some benefits, it often come with a page whether to accept the terms and conditons, do we read them, not me. It may be possible that some of the terms and conditions require your phone information to be released as target for advertisers. IT's not very nice to receive these unsolicited calls, but at the same time it's hard to really pin it down how did these calls actually arise,

rex; January 18, 2011 10:43 PM
yujuan said...: We have bank relationship managers
sending over investment choices by courier, or even better, personally coming over to our home to sell them.
These tactics used really scare us off.; January 19, 2011 1:13 PM
Spur said...: 10 years ago when I lived in UK, for first 3 months I too received many tele-sales calls. Many of the sales staff ended their calls by asking me if I wanted to be put on their "No Call" database. Usually I'll say yes and I received no more calls from that company after that.

Later my neighbour told me that UK has a national database for consumers to specify that they do not want to receive such marketing calls or even "junk mail" by post. I put down my phone number into the database and after that no more calls! Except for just 1 call from an Indian-sounding girl. I later learnt that the company outsourced their call centre to Bangalore. But the company had problems with providing the No-Call list overseas due to Data Protection laws.

Singapore's situation will improve only when there is greater respect for the individual over big businesses or even over govt entities. UK and other developed countries are able to put such things in place becoz they have very strong privacy laws as well as data protection laws (which sometimes clash, as in my example above).

In Singapore, most data protection and privacy laws are drawn up to protect govt entities (Official Secrets Act) or big businesses with the financial muscle to hire expensive litigation lawyers (contract laws, computer misuse act, etc).; January 19, 2011 2:04 PM