At first glance, my wife and I felt the due date was a bit earlier than usual and, upon calculating, we realised that the due date is actually only 16 days from the statement date.

On the OCBC credit card bill, it is printed that the Repayment Grace Period offered by OCBC is 22 days. It seems that OCBC had either made a mistake of reducing my repayment period to 16 days (a difference of six days) or it had taken the liberty of changing the terms on its own.

To be fair, we are mindful that Feb 7 and 8 are the Chinese New Year holidays and that this perhaps could affect the financial cycle runs of the company. We went ahead and checked our credit card bills from other banks.

Apparently ABN Amro and Citibank have no problem having the due date falling on a CNY holiday.

HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, which have the same statement dates as OCBC bank, did not need to reduce the repayment grace period to adjust for the CNY holidays. We are surprised why OCBC needed to do that.

I called up OCBC customer service hotline on the evening of Jan 25 (as the bill reached my house only on that date) and spoke to a customer service officer, Ms Vin.

Her reply was that:

1. She doesn't know what other banks are doing, but in OCBC it's probably because it did not want the payments to fall on the CNY holidays.

2. Upon my request to speak to someone else whom I could explain the situation to, Ms Vin replied that OCBC credit card department officers do not speak to customers and that even if I were to go down to any of the OCBC branches, they would not be able to help me.

I am surprised that a bank could arbitrarily change the repayment grace period agreement at its own convenience.

Kum Shun Thong