Johannesburg - First National Bank (FNB) on Thursday lodged
a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) against
Standard Bank's claim that the rival bank was saving customers up to 50% in
bank fees.
Standard Bank launched a pricing strategy at the Standard
Bank global leadership centre on Thursday, saying it would introduce a
low price offering, which all existing personal account holders would be moved
to automatically.
Standard Bank chief executive Peter Schlebusch said he
was expecting FNB to respond with a complaint against Standard Bank's claims.
"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
non-existent or non-available products; this practice is prohibited by the
ASA," said Bernice Samuels, FNB chief marketing officer, in a statement
released on Thursday.
Samuels said that the claims Standard Bank made were not
properly supported in their view.
"There are no further details on Standard Bank's
website and no additional information is given should an interested person send
an SMS as requested in the advertisement. The claims can be seen as misleading,"
she said.
This is not the first advertising-related dispute that the
two megabanks have had.
Earlier this month, Standard Bank lodged a complaint with
the ASA, saying that FNB advertised its products falsely.
The dispute caused further controversy when the two banks
referred to each other on social networking site twitter on their respective
accounts.
Schlebusch spoke about the dispute with FNB and said that
Standard Bank lodged its complaint with the ASA with the interests of clients
in mind.
"We don't think it was a twitter spat. We told the
media and tweeted our issue with FNB's claims. If we hadn't tweeted it, it
wouldn't have been a twitter issue.
"We were merely saying that we are prepared
to go to war for clients, but let us all do so fairly and honestly," he
said.
FNB said in the statement it would await the outcome
of the dispute and respect the ASA's decision, and that it lodged the
complaint "in the interests of a better informed public".