ICICI charges for NEFT transactions

The National Electronic Funds Transfer scheme was launched by the Reserve Bank of India earlier this year to facilitate online inter-bank fund transfers across India. The aim of this I believe is to reduce the volume of cheque transactions which could save time and money to banks as the new system is fully automated unlike cheques that are processed manually.

While banks incur a cost when cheques are processed (because manual labour is involved), there are no charges when it comes to electronic transfers because computers do the work. I am surprised why banks including ICICI don't charge for cheque transactions but charge customers for using the NEFT service. If at all there are inter-bank charges that they pass on to the customers, it is high time they talk among themselves to do away with such charges so that everyone stand benefitted.

MS Office 2007 add-in to save files as PDFs

Wow ! I just discovered that you can save a document as a PDF from within MS Office 2007. This is really cool; gone are days when you had to buy software to do just this. Not sure why Microsoft has not bothered to publicize this Add-in. I am sure most of us would need to do this very often.

Here's the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en

Enjoy!

ICICIDirect goes down

ICICIDirect.com purportedly India's largest stock trading portal went down during trading hours today. If this had happened in any other country, I could have sued the service provider.