Experiences and learnings from my usage of Ola Money Postpaid and what to do when things go wrong

[Sumit]

If you ever plan to purchase any financial product from Ola, do go through this article once

This article is regarding a few things:
- How do Postpaid / Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services work
- How regular monitoring of Credit Score is useful not just for financial nerds but for everyone
- What to do in case there are serious issues
- My experience with Ola Money Postpaid

How does Buy Now Pay Later / Post Paid Services work:​

Now-a-days, there are a lot of Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services available. For example -- Ola Money Postpaid, Amazon Pay Later, Slice Card, PostPe, PayTM Postpaid, etc. These services are managed by two companies.

1. Frontend/FinTech partner -- These are companies like Ola, PayTM, and Amazon with which the customer interacts.
2. Lending partner -- These are mostly NBFCs (Non-banking financial companies) like Capital Float, Aditya Birla Finance, etc

Few people are already aware that the fintech company takes a loan on their behalf. The lending partner is the one who provides the actual loan. This loan also shows up in your Credit Report. Depending on your profile, even signing up for such a loan can impact (either positively or negatively) your Credit Score. Paying late bills of such services (which is sometimes just a few hundred rupees) is similar to late payment of an actual loan and will seriously impact your Credit Score.

Another important thing that most people are not aware of is that only the lending partner is the one regulated by RBI and not the Frontend/FinTech partner. In case of any issues, the FinTech partner is not liable to do anything, is not required to have a grievance redressal mechanism and can’t be complained against to RBI's Banking Ombudsman.

My experience with Ola Money Postpaid​

I have been handling multiple Credit Cards for the last 10 years and have never missed a payment in any one of them. My CIBIL score used to be 792 (used to be 800+ before CIBIL changed their algorithms). In December last year, I bought a yearly subscription of CIBIL to better monitor my Credit Score. Within a few weeks of that, I saw that my CS dropped by 40 points which has never happened in the past. On checking the report, I found that Aditya Birla Finance had marked one of my payments as late. I realised that this is from Ola Money Postpaid. I quickly checked and confirmed that this was a mistake and I didn’t do a late payment. On the same day, 31-Dec-2021, I sent an email to Ola complaining about this. This is how I spent my new year's eve.

After a couple of weeks of waiting, Ola finally agreed that this is a mistake from their side and asked for 60 days to correct this. Seriously 60 days!!
From that time onwards, I have sent 21 Reminder emails to Ola, 9 tweets across a period of almost 4 months. Ola has not done anything at all — no I am not exaggerating — they have not done anything at all. Every single time they have asked for more and more time. I wrote to them multiple times asking me to be included in their communication with their lending partner and what other way I can help to speed things up but they just kept on ignoring these requests and asked for more time without. After a point, they stopped responding to reminders emails. My request is still open to this date and there is no one I can complain to about this. I also wrote to Ola CEO Bhavish Agarwal but no response (frankly speaking, I didn’t expect him to respond as well)

Here is how I got this problem resolved and what you can also do when you face something similar​

After Ola continued to ask for more time, I raised a dispute with CIBIL against my Credit Report. That didn’t see much traction though. Finally, I wrote an email to the Banking Ombudsman but they declined to take action since the complaint was not against a regulated entity (Ola in this case). Finally, I formally complained to Banking Ombudsman by filling out a form on their website and raising a complaint against Aditya Birla Finance (ABFL). Within a week, ABFL corrected the mistake, reported it back to all Credit Reporting agencies and their grievance redressal officer called me and confirmed with me. He also told that they have nothing to do with this -- for all Ola Money Postpaid users, they get all the reports and dates from Ola and report that back to Credit Reporting agencies (like CIBIL).

Within 2 weeks of that, late payment disappeared from credit reports of all credit rating agencies. My Credit Score went back to normal in Experian but on CRIF and CIBIL, the score didn’t move much. On CIBIL, it just increased by 7 points whereas it had dropped by almost 40 points. I raised multiple complaints to CIBIL to restore my Credit Score but turn around time from CIBIL was extremely poor — they took more than 30 days to just close my complaint for some random reason. I have raised an escalation for that.

Key learnings:​

1. Regularly monitor your Credit Score and if possible have a subscription to CIBIL's Annual plan. Without this, I would have never found out why my score dropped in the first place.
2. If possible, avoid using BNPL services -- the value that you get back is not worth the pain which you suffer in case things go wrong.
3. Writing to Banking Ombudsman is sometimes the fastest and the last way to get your problem resolved but only after you have already raised a complaint with the bank
4. FinTech partners like Ola/Amazon and others are not regulated and are not responsible to have any grievance redressal mechanism. They do not even have a responsibility to resolve your complaint in the first place and you can't complain against that anywhere (maybe in consumer court but very few of us have the time and money to do that)

In summary, I am still fighting to get my Credit Score back to normal and for a mistake which should have never happened in the first place.
But what worries me the most is how ridiculous and customer insensitive is Ola Money Customer care and their entire team. To this date, Ola is asking for more time to get things resolved .

I am just glad that I didn’t buy a serious product like Health Insurance or Term insurance from Ola. The last thing anyone would want in cases of emergencies is to deal with such a lousy and ridiculous service. This is not the first time I am seeing such mischievous conduct from the Ola group. Even in Ola cabs, their support page to request for reversal of cancellation fee mysteriously doesn't work for weeks. Finally, when it works, they say that a request for reversal of cancellation cannot be taken after a week!!! I have also seen multiple people complaining on Twitter about their Ola Money Postpaid payment page not working and they getting charged late payment fees because of that.

For financial services, most important thing is to have trust and peace of mind. With Ola, I don't have either of that.

 

[Indian]

I closed very next month of their credit report to cibil, I got 7000 as postpaid limit but they reported 50000 as sanctioned loan amount in cibil. Closed in 2019 December.

 

[prc1990]

If you ever plan to purchase any financial product from Ola, do go through this article once

This article is regarding a few things:
- How do Postpaid / Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services work
- How regular monitoring of Credit Score is useful not just for financial nerds but for everyone
- What to do in case there are serious issues
- My experience with Ola Money Postpaid

How does Buy Now Pay Later / Post Paid Services work:​

Now-a-days, there are a lot of Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services available. For example -- Ola Money Postpaid, Amazon Pay Later, Slice Card, PostPe, PayTM Postpaid, etc. These services are managed by two companies.

1. Frontend/FinTech partner -- These are companies like Ola, PayTM, and Amazon with which the customer interacts.
2. Lending partner -- These are mostly NBFCs (Non-banking financial companies) like Capital Float, Aditya Birla Finance, etc

Few people are already aware that the fintech company takes a loan on their behalf. The lending partner is the one who provides the actual loan. This loan also shows up in your Credit Report. Depending on your profile, even signing up for such a loan can impact (either positively or negatively) your Credit Score. Paying late bills of such services (which is sometimes just a few hundred rupees) is similar to late payment of an actual loan and will seriously impact your Credit Score.

Another important thing that most people are not aware of is that only the lending partner is the one regulated by RBI and not the Frontend/FinTech partner. In case of any issues, the FinTech partner is not liable to do anything, is not required to have a grievance redressal mechanism and can’t be complained against to RBI's Banking Ombudsman.

My experience with Ola Money Postpaid​

I have been handling multiple Credit Cards for the last 10 years and have never missed a payment in any one of them. My CIBIL score used to be 792 (used to be 800+ before CIBIL changed their algorithms). In December last year, I bought a yearly subscription of CIBIL to better monitor my Credit Score. Within a few weeks of that, I saw that my CS dropped by 40 points which has never happened in the past. On checking the report, I found that Aditya Birla Finance had marked one of my payments as late. I realised that this is from Ola Money Postpaid. I quickly checked and confirmed that this was a mistake and I didn’t do a late payment. On the same day, 31-Dec-2021, I sent an email to Ola complaining about this. This is how I spent my new year's eve.

After a couple of weeks of waiting, Ola finally agreed that this is a mistake from their side and asked for 60 days to correct this. Seriously 60 days!!
From that time onwards, I have sent 21 Reminder emails to Ola, 9 tweets across a period of almost 4 months. Ola has not done anything at all — no I am not exaggerating — they have not done anything at all. Every single time they have asked for more and more time. I wrote to them multiple times asking me to be included in their communication with their lending partner and what other way I can help to speed things up but they just kept on ignoring these requests and asked for more time without. After a point, they stopped responding to reminders emails. My request is still open to this date and there is no one I can complain to about this. I also wrote to Ola CEO Bhavish Agarwal but no response (frankly speaking, I didn’t expect him to respond as well)

Here is how I got this problem resolved and what you can also do when you face something similar​

After Ola continued to ask for more time, I raised a dispute with CIBIL against my Credit Report. That didn’t see much traction though. Finally, I wrote an email to the Banking Ombudsman but they declined to take action since the complaint was not against a regulated entity (Ola in this case). Finally, I formally complained to Banking Ombudsman by filling out a form on their website and raising a complaint against Aditya Birla Finance (ABFL). Within a week, ABFL corrected the mistake, reported it back to all Credit Reporting agencies and their grievance redressal officer called me and confirmed with me. He also told that they have nothing to do with this -- for all Ola Money Postpaid users, they get all the reports and dates from Ola and report that back to Credit Reporting agencies (like CIBIL).

Within 2 weeks of that, late payment disappeared from credit reports of all credit rating agencies. My Credit Score went back to normal in Experian but on CRIF and CIBIL, the score didn’t move much. On CIBIL, it just increased by 7 points whereas it had dropped by almost 40 points. I raised multiple complaints to CIBIL to restore my Credit Score but turn around time from CIBIL was extremely poor — they took more than 30 days to just close my complaint for some random reason. I have raised an escalation for that.

Key learnings:​

1. Regularly monitor your Credit Score and if possible have a subscription to CIBIL's Annual plan. Without this, I would have never found out why my score dropped in the first place.
2. If possible, avoid using BNPL services -- the value that you get back is not worth the pain which you suffer in case things go wrong.
3. Writing to Banking Ombudsman is sometimes the fastest and the last way to get your problem resolved but only after you have already raised a complaint with the bank
4. FinTech partners like Ola/Amazon and others are not regulated and are not responsible to have any grievance redressal mechanism. They do not even have a responsibility to resolve your complaint in the first place and you can't complain against that anywhere (maybe in consumer court but very few of us have the time and money to do that)

In summary, I am still fighting to get my Credit Score back to normal and for a mistake which should have never happened in the first place.
But what worries me the most is how ridiculous and customer insensitive is Ola Money Customer care and their entire team. To this date, Ola is asking for more time to get things resolved .

I am just glad that I didn’t buy a serious product like Health Insurance or Term insurance from Ola. The last thing anyone would want in cases of emergencies is to deal with such a lousy and ridiculous service. This is not the first time I am seeing such mischievous conduct from the Ola group. Even in Ola cabs, their support page to request for reversal of cancellation fee mysteriously doesn't work for weeks. Finally, when it works, they say that a request for reversal of cancellation cannot be taken after a week!!! I have also seen multiple people complaining on Twitter about their Ola Money Postpaid payment page not working and they getting charged late payment fees because of that.

For financial services, most important thing is to have trust and peace of mind. With Ola, I don't have either of that.

Did you complain through https://cms.rbi.org.in?

 

[AllSeeker]

Indeed, it is best to not use pay later services, they are not worth the hassle and possible hit to CIBIL. There was a time I was fascinated by it but later I learnt from experience.

Also, these front end fin tech services don't seem to have any knowledgeable customer support to address issues if you contact them about it.

 

[yolofino]

Ola, Byjus, Oyo - all three have absolutely worst practices and customer service. Avoid them even if they give something for free.

 

[Sumit]

Did you complain through https://cms.rbi.org.in?

Yes

 

[Nick]

If you ever plan to purchase any financial product from Ola, do go through this article once

This article is regarding a few things:
- How do Postpaid / Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services work
- How regular monitoring of Credit Score is useful not just for financial nerds but for everyone
- What to do in case there are serious issues
- My experience with Ola Money Postpaid

How does Buy Now Pay Later / Post Paid Services work:​

Now-a-days, there are a lot of Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services available. For example -- Ola Money Postpaid, Amazon Pay Later, Slice Card, PostPe, PayTM Postpaid, etc. These services are managed by two companies.

1. Frontend/FinTech partner -- These are companies like Ola, PayTM, and Amazon with which the customer interacts.
2. Lending partner -- These are mostly NBFCs (Non-banking financial companies) like Capital Float, Aditya Birla Finance, etc

Few people are already aware that the fintech company takes a loan on their behalf. The lending partner is the one who provides the actual loan. This loan also shows up in your Credit Report. Depending on your profile, even signing up for such a loan can impact (either positively or negatively) your Credit Score. Paying late bills of such services (which is sometimes just a few hundred rupees) is similar to late payment of an actual loan and will seriously impact your Credit Score.

Another important thing that most people are not aware of is that only the lending partner is the one regulated by RBI and not the Frontend/FinTech partner. In case of any issues, the FinTech partner is not liable to do anything, is not required to have a grievance redressal mechanism and can’t be complained against to RBI's Banking Ombudsman.

My experience with Ola Money Postpaid​

I have been handling multiple Credit Cards for the last 10 years and have never missed a payment in any one of them. My CIBIL score used to be 792 (used to be 800+ before CIBIL changed their algorithms). In December last year, I bought a yearly subscription of CIBIL to better monitor my Credit Score. Within a few weeks of that, I saw that my CS dropped by 40 points which has never happened in the past. On checking the report, I found that Aditya Birla Finance had marked one of my payments as late. I realised that this is from Ola Money Postpaid. I quickly checked and confirmed that this was a mistake and I didn’t do a late payment. On the same day, 31-Dec-2021, I sent an email to Ola complaining about this. This is how I spent my new year's eve.

After a couple of weeks of waiting, Ola finally agreed that this is a mistake from their side and asked for 60 days to correct this. Seriously 60 days!!
From that time onwards, I have sent 21 Reminder emails to Ola, 9 tweets across a period of almost 4 months. Ola has not done anything at all — no I am not exaggerating — they have not done anything at all. Every single time they have asked for more and more time. I wrote to them multiple times asking me to be included in their communication with their lending partner and what other way I can help to speed things up but they just kept on ignoring these requests and asked for more time without. After a point, they stopped responding to reminders emails. My request is still open to this date and there is no one I can complain to about this. I also wrote to Ola CEO Bhavish Agarwal but no response (frankly speaking, I didn’t expect him to respond as well)

Here is how I got this problem resolved and what you can also do when you face something similar​

After Ola continued to ask for more time, I raised a dispute with CIBIL against my Credit Report. That didn’t see much traction though. Finally, I wrote an email to the Banking Ombudsman but they declined to take action since the complaint was not against a regulated entity (Ola in this case). Finally, I formally complained to Banking Ombudsman by filling out a form on their website and raising a complaint against Aditya Birla Finance (ABFL). Within a week, ABFL corrected the mistake, reported it back to all Credit Reporting agencies and their grievance redressal officer called me and confirmed with me. He also told that they have nothing to do with this -- for all Ola Money Postpaid users, they get all the reports and dates from Ola and report that back to Credit Reporting agencies (like CIBIL).

Within 2 weeks of that, late payment disappeared from credit reports of all credit rating agencies. My Credit Score went back to normal in Experian but on CRIF and CIBIL, the score didn’t move much. On CIBIL, it just increased by 7 points whereas it had dropped by almost 40 points. I raised multiple complaints to CIBIL to restore my Credit Score but turn around time from CIBIL was extremely poor — they took more than 30 days to just close my complaint for some random reason. I have raised an escalation for that.

Key learnings:​

1. Regularly monitor your Credit Score and if possible have a subscription to CIBIL's Annual plan. Without this, I would have never found out why my score dropped in the first place.
2. If possible, avoid using BNPL services -- the value that you get back is not worth the pain which you suffer in case things go wrong.
3. Writing to Banking Ombudsman is sometimes the fastest and the last way to get your problem resolved but only after you have already raised a complaint with the bank
4. FinTech partners like Ola/Amazon and others are not regulated and are not responsible to have any grievance redressal mechanism. They do not even have a responsibility to resolve your complaint in the first place and you can't complain against that anywhere (maybe in consumer court but very few of us have the time and money to do that)

In summary, I am still fighting to get my Credit Score back to normal and for a mistake which should have never happened in the first place.
But what worries me the most is how ridiculous and customer insensitive is Ola Money Customer care and their entire team. To this date, Ola is asking for more time to get things resolved .

I am just glad that I didn’t buy a serious product like Health Insurance or Term insurance from Ola. The last thing anyone would want in cases of emergencies is to deal with such a lousy and ridiculous service. This is not the first time I am seeing such mischievous conduct from the Ola group. Even in Ola cabs, their support page to request for reversal of cancellation fee mysteriously doesn't work for weeks. Finally, when it works, they say that a request for reversal of cancellation cannot be taken after a week!!! I have also seen multiple people complaining on Twitter about their Ola Money Postpaid payment page not working and they getting charged late payment fees because of that.

For financial services, most important thing is to have trust and peace of mind. With Ola, I don't have either of that.

BNPL services are good for nothing. The only thing one gets is headaches and waste of time. Had ola money postpaid and closed the same once I started receiving calls and texts to upgrade into postpaid plus service. After multiple emails and 45 days the account was finally closed.

Back in 2019 a friend told me about Lazypay. I started using the service and they gradually increased my spending limit to 9999 but the account was not reported to any credit bureau. In late 2020 PayU finance increased the limit to 35k and upgraded the account to Lazypay Plus and reported the same to CIBIL and other agencies as a personal loan with the account opening date of 2019. I got in touch with PayU finance to close the account but all they did was deactivation leaving the account open in my credit reports. I then raised the issue with RBI Ombudsman and Lazypay finally closed the account in September 2021.

Lazypay miraculously reopened the account a week back without my request or consent and I started getting calls from them to apply for Lazypay Card. Had to email again to every possible contact and they reported the account again as closed 2 days later. Such services always leave you at the verge of ruining your credit score and possible frauds. Better stay away.

 

[AllSeeker]

Haha, I had also similar experience, flipkart blatantly ignored me and even marked "Service request as solved" without actually doing anything, I maild IDFC directly and then closed it in a single day. I'm told it will take 45 days to reflect in CIBIL.

Contact their lending partners.

 

[Anirudh987]

Haha, I had also similar experience, flipkart blatantly ignored me and even marked "Service request as solved" without actually doing anything, I maild IDFC directly and then closed it in a single day. I'm told it will take 45 days to reflect in CIBIL.

Contact their lending partners.

Can you share email id of IDFC bank on which you mailed? I am facing same problem.

 

[prc1990]

Can you share email id of IDFC bank on which you mailed? I am facing same problem.

Kindly check from here: https://www.technofino.in/community/threads/all-bank-credit-card-department-email-id-phone-no.529/

 

[AllSeeker]

Can you share email id of IDFC bank on which you mailed? I am facing same problem.

pno@idfcfirstbank.com

 

[jatinkrmalik]

Man, that's quite a harassment.

I have recently applied for closure of my Slice card and it's so difficult as I am receiving multiple calls to convince me to just deactivate my account instead of closing the NBFC credit line.

I had to warn them with the banking ombudsman escalation for them to comply.

 

[prc1990]

Man, that's quite a harassment.

I have recently applied for closure of my Slice card and it's so difficult as I am receiving multiple calls to convince me to just deactivate my account instead of closing the NBFC credit line.

I had to warn them with the banking ombudsman escalation for them to comply.

What did they respond when you referred to ombudsman?

 

[jatinkrmalik]

What did they respond when you referred to ombudsman?

Well, quoting the reply:

We are reaching out to you with respect to ticket ID xxxxxx where you have requested that we close your slice account registered with phone number xxxxxxxxx and email xxxx@xxxx.com.

However, we don't want to let you go hence we request you to let us know the purpose of this request for choosing to opt out of our services which provide unparalleled offers and rewards so that we will try our level best to fulfil it without letting you go away.

Please note that closing the credit line is a permanent activity and you will not be able to use slice in the future, hence, if you are awaiting any refunds we would suggest you wait and proceed as you may not be able to use the refund amount once the account is closed.

If you would still like to proceed with the account closure process, please CONFIRM your choice by replying to this email and we will process your request at the earliest.

Thank you and have a great day ahead!

 

[prc1990]

Well, quoting the reply:

They think on this entire universe they are the only one who are smart 🙂.

They don't know the fact that 'Bap ka bhi bap hota hain'.

 

[Ad.Astra]

If you ever plan to purchase any financial product from Ola, do go through this article once

This article is regarding a few things:
- How do Postpaid / Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services work
- How regular monitoring of Credit Score is useful not just for financial nerds but for everyone
- What to do in case there are serious issues
- My experience with Ola Money Postpaid

How does Buy Now Pay Later / Post Paid Services work:​

Now-a-days, there are a lot of Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services available. For example -- Ola Money Postpaid, Amazon Pay Later, Slice Card, PostPe, PayTM Postpaid, etc. These services are managed by two companies.

1. Frontend/FinTech partner -- These are companies like Ola, PayTM, and Amazon with which the customer interacts.
2. Lending partner -- These are mostly NBFCs (Non-banking financial companies) like Capital Float, Aditya Birla Finance, etc

Few people are already aware that the fintech company takes a loan on their behalf. The lending partner is the one who provides the actual loan. This loan also shows up in your Credit Report. Depending on your profile, even signing up for such a loan can impact (either positively or negatively) your Credit Score. Paying late bills of such services (which is sometimes just a few hundred rupees) is similar to late payment of an actual loan and will seriously impact your Credit Score.

Another important thing that most people are not aware of is that only the lending partner is the one regulated by RBI and not the Frontend/FinTech partner. In case of any issues, the FinTech partner is not liable to do anything, is not required to have a grievance redressal mechanism and can’t be complained against to RBI's Banking Ombudsman.

My experience with Ola Money Postpaid​

I have been handling multiple Credit Cards for the last 10 years and have never missed a payment in any one of them. My CIBIL score used to be 792 (used to be 800+ before CIBIL changed their algorithms). In December last year, I bought a yearly subscription of CIBIL to better monitor my Credit Score. Within a few weeks of that, I saw that my CS dropped by 40 points which has never happened in the past. On checking the report, I found that Aditya Birla Finance had marked one of my payments as late. I realised that this is from Ola Money Postpaid. I quickly checked and confirmed that this was a mistake and I didn’t do a late payment. On the same day, 31-Dec-2021, I sent an email to Ola complaining about this. This is how I spent my new year's eve.

After a couple of weeks of waiting, Ola finally agreed that this is a mistake from their side and asked for 60 days to correct this. Seriously 60 days!!
From that time onwards, I have sent 21 Reminder emails to Ola, 9 tweets across a period of almost 4 months. Ola has not done anything at all — no I am not exaggerating — they have not done anything at all. Every single time they have asked for more and more time. I wrote to them multiple times asking me to be included in their communication with their lending partner and what other way I can help to speed things up but they just kept on ignoring these requests and asked for more time without. After a point, they stopped responding to reminders emails. My request is still open to this date and there is no one I can complain to about this. I also wrote to Ola CEO Bhavish Agarwal but no response (frankly speaking, I didn’t expect him to respond as well)

Here is how I got this problem resolved and what you can also do when you face something similar​

After Ola continued to ask for more time, I raised a dispute with CIBIL against my Credit Report. That didn’t see much traction though. Finally, I wrote an email to the Banking Ombudsman but they declined to take action since the complaint was not against a regulated entity (Ola in this case). Finally, I formally complained to Banking Ombudsman by filling out a form on their website and raising a complaint against Aditya Birla Finance (ABFL). Within a week, ABFL corrected the mistake, reported it back to all Credit Reporting agencies and their grievance redressal officer called me and confirmed with me. He also told that they have nothing to do with this -- for all Ola Money Postpaid users, they get all the reports and dates from Ola and report that back to Credit Reporting agencies (like CIBIL).

Within 2 weeks of that, late payment disappeared from credit reports of all credit rating agencies. My Credit Score went back to normal in Experian but on CRIF and CIBIL, the score didn’t move much. On CIBIL, it just increased by 7 points whereas it had dropped by almost 40 points. I raised multiple complaints to CIBIL to restore my Credit Score but turn around time from CIBIL was extremely poor — they took more than 30 days to just close my complaint for some random reason. I have raised an escalation for that.

Key learnings:​

1. Regularly monitor your Credit Score and if possible have a subscription to CIBIL's Annual plan. Without this, I would have never found out why my score dropped in the first place.
2. If possible, avoid using BNPL services -- the value that you get back is not worth the pain which you suffer in case things go wrong.
3. Writing to Banking Ombudsman is sometimes the fastest and the last way to get your problem resolved but only after you have already raised a complaint with the bank
4. FinTech partners like Ola/Amazon and others are not regulated and are not responsible to have any grievance redressal mechanism. They do not even have a responsibility to resolve your complaint in the first place and you can't complain against that anywhere (maybe in consumer court but very few of us have the time and money to do that)

In summary, I am still fighting to get my Credit Score back to normal and for a mistake which should have never happened in the first place.
But what worries me the most is how ridiculous and customer insensitive is Ola Money Customer care and their entire team. To this date, Ola is asking for more time to get things resolved .

I am just glad that I didn’t buy a serious product like Health Insurance or Term insurance from Ola. The last thing anyone would want in cases of emergencies is to deal with such a lousy and ridiculous service. This is not the first time I am seeing such mischievous conduct from the Ola group. Even in Ola cabs, their support page to request for reversal of cancellation fee mysteriously doesn't work for weeks. Finally, when it works, they say that a request for reversal of cancellation cannot be taken after a week!!! I have also seen multiple people complaining on Twitter about their Ola Money Postpaid payment page not working and they getting charged late payment fees because of that.

For financial services, most important thing is to have trust and peace of mind. With Ola, I don't have either of that.

Faced similar situation with Flipkart Pay Later & it's NBFC partner IDFC First Bank. I paid a small due amount well in advance, but it was reported overdue in CIBIL report, and my score fell by 40 points just for ₹500 due!

I logged in to CIBIL account and have disputed it and it is settled in my favour. But I have to see how it is reflected in my next month's credit report.

These Pay Later services will sure mess up your credit score with their irresponsible reporting. I suggest everyone not to use these Pay Later / BNPL services too much.

 

[Extrovert🌃]

Even for Paytm postpaid, they closed my account first time. But when I opened 2nd time, they are not closing it even after repeated requests. Basically what you told, they'll open an account but won't take any responsibility.

I'll have to mail the partner sometime to get it fixed

Just tweet them. They'll close it within one working day. See the timings of the reply and shortly after the reply Recieved NOC

 

[sandeepmk06]

If you ever plan to purchase any financial product from Ola, do go through this article once

This article is regarding a few things:
- How do Postpaid / Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services work
- How regular monitoring of Credit Score is useful not just for financial nerds but for everyone
- What to do in case there are serious issues
- My experience with Ola Money Postpaid

How does Buy Now Pay Later / Post Paid Services work:​

Now-a-days, there are a lot of Buy Now Pay Later kinds of services available. For example -- Ola Money Postpaid, Amazon Pay Later, Slice Card, PostPe, PayTM Postpaid, etc. These services are managed by two companies.

1. Frontend/FinTech partner -- These are companies like Ola, PayTM, and Amazon with which the customer interacts.
2. Lending partner -- These are mostly NBFCs (Non-banking financial companies) like Capital Float, Aditya Birla Finance, etc

Few people are already aware that the fintech company takes a loan on their behalf. The lending partner is the one who provides the actual loan. This loan also shows up in your Credit Report. Depending on your profile, even signing up for such a loan can impact (either positively or negatively) your Credit Score. Paying late bills of such services (which is sometimes just a few hundred rupees) is similar to late payment of an actual loan and will seriously impact your Credit Score.

Another important thing that most people are not aware of is that only the lending partner is the one regulated by RBI and not the Frontend/FinTech partner. In case of any issues, the FinTech partner is not liable to do anything, is not required to have a grievance redressal mechanism and can’t be complained against to RBI's Banking Ombudsman.

My experience with Ola Money Postpaid​

I have been handling multiple Credit Cards for the last 10 years and have never missed a payment in any one of them. My CIBIL score used to be 792 (used to be 800+ before CIBIL changed their algorithms). In December last year, I bought a yearly subscription of CIBIL to better monitor my Credit Score. Within a few weeks of that, I saw that my CS dropped by 40 points which has never happened in the past. On checking the report, I found that Aditya Birla Finance had marked one of my payments as late. I realised that this is from Ola Money Postpaid. I quickly checked and confirmed that this was a mistake and I didn’t do a late payment. On the same day, 31-Dec-2021, I sent an email to Ola complaining about this. This is how I spent my new year's eve.

After a couple of weeks of waiting, Ola finally agreed that this is a mistake from their side and asked for 60 days to correct this. Seriously 60 days!!
From that time onwards, I have sent 21 Reminder emails to Ola, 9 tweets across a period of almost 4 months. Ola has not done anything at all — no I am not exaggerating — they have not done anything at all. Every single time they have asked for more and more time. I wrote to them multiple times asking me to be included in their communication with their lending partner and what other way I can help to speed things up but they just kept on ignoring these requests and asked for more time without. After a point, they stopped responding to reminders emails. My request is still open to this date and there is no one I can complain to about this. I also wrote to Ola CEO Bhavish Agarwal but no response (frankly speaking, I didn’t expect him to respond as well)

Here is how I got this problem resolved and what you can also do when you face something similar​

After Ola continued to ask for more time, I raised a dispute with CIBIL against my Credit Report. That didn’t see much traction though. Finally, I wrote an email to the Banking Ombudsman but they declined to take action since the complaint was not against a regulated entity (Ola in this case). Finally, I formally complained to Banking Ombudsman by filling out a form on their website and raising a complaint against Aditya Birla Finance (ABFL). Within a week, ABFL corrected the mistake, reported it back to all Credit Reporting agencies and their grievance redressal officer called me and confirmed with me. He also told that they have nothing to do with this -- for all Ola Money Postpaid users, they get all the reports and dates from Ola and report that back to Credit Reporting agencies (like CIBIL).

Within 2 weeks of that, late payment disappeared from credit reports of all credit rating agencies. My Credit Score went back to normal in Experian but on CRIF and CIBIL, the score didn’t move much. On CIBIL, it just increased by 7 points whereas it had dropped by almost 40 points. I raised multiple complaints to CIBIL to restore my Credit Score but turn around time from CIBIL was extremely poor — they took more than 30 days to just close my complaint for some random reason. I have raised an escalation for that.

Key learnings:​

1. Regularly monitor your Credit Score and if possible have a subscription to CIBIL's Annual plan. Without this, I would have never found out why my score dropped in the first place.
2. If possible, avoid using BNPL services -- the value that you get back is not worth the pain which you suffer in case things go wrong.
3. Writing to Banking Ombudsman is sometimes the fastest and the last way to get your problem resolved but only after you have already raised a complaint with the bank
4. FinTech partners like Ola/Amazon and others are not regulated and are not responsible to have any grievance redressal mechanism. They do not even have a responsibility to resolve your complaint in the first place and you can't complain against that anywhere (maybe in consumer court but very few of us have the time and money to do that)

In summary, I am still fighting to get my Credit Score back to normal and for a mistake which should have never happened in the first place.
But what worries me the most is how ridiculous and customer insensitive is Ola Money Customer care and their entire team. To this date, Ola is asking for more time to get things resolved .

I am just glad that I didn’t buy a serious product like Health Insurance or Term insurance from Ola. The last thing anyone would want in cases of emergencies is to deal with such a lousy and ridiculous service. This is not the first time I am seeing such mischievous conduct from the Ola group. Even in Ola cabs, their support page to request for reversal of cancellation fee mysteriously doesn't work for weeks. Finally, when it works, they say that a request for reversal of cancellation cannot be taken after a week!!! I have also seen multiple people complaining on Twitter about their Ola Money Postpaid payment page not working and they getting charged late payment fees because of that.

For financial services, most important thing is to have trust and peace of mind. With Ola, I don't have either of that.

Is it your Ola Postpaid or Ola Postpaid Plus account ?. I too have Ola Postpaid since many years but its still not added in to my credit reports. Getting an invite of Postpaid Plus, but not accepting that because it may add that loan account in the CIBIL.

 

[Vicky99]

My experience with ola money postpaid plus.. Experian score was 865 prior applying ola money . At that time I don't use to check always cibil score .. when i have checked my score droped to ~780 . I was shocked . I checked there is a customer durable loan of 20k while having limit of 2k only . Contacted them told them the issue they told they will fix it . After then my score was updated to 785 on Experian . Out of frustration i i closed my account .and took 2 months more to reflect to my experian. And after 6-8 months my score settled at 810 now currently at 819 . I know that i will unable to reach that same score anytime soon 😞.

 

[ashwink]

Experian is a very unstable score ...
Worry about Cibil ... Not Experian

Why bro experian score unstable means 🤔