A month ago the battle between FNB and Standard Bank was just heating up. Following Standard Bank’s complaints about FNB’s “misleading” advertising in February, the banks remain at loggerheads. In recent days FNB has lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about its competitor, which it says is now attempting “to sell nonexistent products”.

The complaint is in response to Standard Bank’s new pricing strategy and new products which it launched last week with claims that they will help customers save 50% in their banking fees. Bernice Samuels, FNB’s chief marketing officer, sums up why her bank has taken issue with this:

“Standard Bank stated that the 50% saving will be available at a later date in April, some two weeks after the publication of the material. FNB’s position is that the advertisement sets out to sell nonexistent or nonavailable products. This practice is prohibited by the ASA.”

However it seems Standard Bank is not at all concerned that its advertising will be found misleading or untruthful. The company has stated:

“We demonstrated how customers can save up to 50% and more and introduced the media to our simplified and transparent personal current accounts, which will be available from 2 April 2012. These price reductions will benefit the almost 1.5 million Standard Bank personal current account customers, who are already using these products and we are merely reducing the pricing on these products.”

It remains to be seen what consumers (you know, the people who will ultimately be affected by all the changes) will think of the new pricing by Standard Bank when it’s actually available next month, but in the meantime it’s still fairly entertaining to watch the banks pick fights with one another.

[Source: Business Day/Business Live]