On the Matter of Western Union collection policy, Ecobank was wrong
E. Ablorh-Odjidja

May 23, 2014

On May 22, 2014, I was able to collect a second Western Union remittance at Ecobank branch at East Airport on the power of my Ghana driver's license as identification document.

That wasn't the case when I had gone to the same branch on May 09, 2014 to collect a first remittance.

On May 09, 2014, my driver's license was rejected , in preference for my passport, because of an alleged Western Union policy.

Ecobank is an agent of Western Union. It is entitled by commissioning to know more about the latter's operating policies than customers do.

But knowing what the policy is and stating it accurately is another matter, I came to find out.

From an absolute statement of a foreign passport requirement by Western Union policy, there came a position shift in my talk over the phone with a Mr. Kasatee and a Ms. Abigail Aye-Addo; all Ecobank officials.

During the separate conversations with the above officials, the alleged Western Union policy never came up.

Instead, there were different explanations, namely;

1. That the bank didn't have the mechanism to verify a Ghanaian drivers license, said Mr. Kanatee.  My question to him was whether the bank had the mechanism to verify an American passport.  That question went unanswered

2, That I had presented an expired Ghanaian driver's license. This excuse was offered by Ms. Abigail Aye-Addo to a reporter from The Chronicle who had read my initial piece on the subject and had decided to investigate the essential elements of the story. This excuse was later retracted but not till after the report in The Chronicle had come out and gotten me confounded.

The truth of the matter was my Ghanaian driver's license had not expired. Neither was any of the other documents that I had offered.

The next day May 20, 2014, I called Ms. Aye-Addo on telephone line 0302680867 to know why she had offered the excuse of an expired license to the reporter.

Ms. Aye-Addo response was that she had gotten the expired license information from the wrong bank branch. She said she was told at this branch that coincidentally some one had presented an expired license for collection the same day I was being rejected at the other branch.

The sheer coincidence told its own story!

But at this point, I had already concluded that there was something blatantly untruthful about Ms. Aye-Addo's story.

Not only that.  She had told me she was doing "due diligence" on my case. So why would she not call to query me about the expired driver's license before giving her  story to the reporter?

Whether the corporate culture of Ecobank allowed false excuses for cover up of mistakes was something I would not know.

But, the contradictions pointed to one conclusion: There could not have been such Western Union policy as I was originally told.

"Due diligence" in lay man's term is a process for finding out the truth. Ms. Abigail did not care to find out the truth. She didn't even care if my reputation was tarnished by the false charge of presenting an expired driver's license at a bank. And she had to date not followed up with the reporter to seek correction.

However, before ending our conversation on the phone, I told her that Ecobank owed me an apology.  And that the requirement for collection stated by Western Union on its web site is "to fill Form (TRMF) and present government issued ID)

Under this requirement, my active Ghana driver's license should have been enough!

The happy part of this story is something got changed at Ecobank, at least at the East Airport branch.

No longer would a Ghanaian, with dual citizenship, be forced to produce anything other than official Ghanaian identification document to collect remittances at Ecobank (at least at the East Airport branch, I presumed).

I had a second remittance sent to me via Western Union as a test. I told the branch manager I was only prepared to offer as an identification document an authentic  Ghanaian government issued ID.

 I made the collection at this branch without fuss.

The grateful part was this manager took time to escort me to my car, while along the way he kept offering apologies on behalf of Ecobank.

Ms. Aye-Addo, the public relation official, had not bothered to call me since we last spoke. Hopefully, she is busy preparing the promised official apology.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, May 23, 2014

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