My Plight with the Banco de Oro ATMs in Bacolod

Banco de Oro or BDO is perhaps the biggest banking network in the Philippines today. But I don’t have an account with them. I am pretty much content with Metrobank and Maybank.

But then, there came a point when I needed their services because my brother went to the United States and he sends me money to deposit here in the Philippines. His payroll account is with BDO, so from the US, he remits his money in dollars that gets converted into pesos in his BDO account. Then he transfers a certain amount to a BDO account here in Bacolod.

At first, we used the account of my parents but eventually, we found it cumbersome. So instead, I opened a new account with BDO–an ATM savings account. That means it comes with an ATM card but does not include a passbook. So all the transactions are done through ATM.

Now, here in Bacolod, there are so many BDO branches. I cannot name them all, as I am not aware if there are still others. All I know is that there is a BDO Araneta, BDO SM, BDO Gonzaga, BDO Rosario-Lacson, BDO Capitol Hilado, BDO Gaisano City, BDO Robinsons, BDO BS Aquino Drive, and BDO Lacson. I believe there are still more.

Anyway, the customer service was pretty good when I opened my account. The problem was when I needed to withdraw money. Sometimes it would take us several visits to different branches at different times of the day in order to withdraw money. There has not been a single time that I withdrew money from BDO and merely went to a single branch and got what I needed immediately. For the last several months, we had to move from one branch to the other because the machine was either offline, out of order, or could not dispense money. This situation is much worse on Sundays. And this happens at any given time of the day.

Another thing, there were also several instances that I would be lining up to the bank’s employees. Yep, it seems that in the several occasions that I withdrew money, the employees of BDO were also withdrawing money from the ATM.

Additionally, I really hate the machines at the Hilado and Rosario-Lacson branches. It is very difficult to read the monitor because they are situated where the glare of the sun is blurring the screen. It is really very irritating. At the Rosario-Lacson branch, I almost have to climb up in order to see the screen because I am a small person.

And today, I went to visit a friend in the hospital because she just gave birth. She was admitted around 5:30am and her husband went out to withdraw money from BDO. All the ATMs he visited were offline. What a coincidence! It happens to us all the time! Too bad, when the husband came back after a couple of hours in order to borrow money from his mother, the wife already gave birth. Imagine that! BDO is an ugly part of this joyous memory.

Now, BDO is a big bank and I would expect better service than this. I did not have this much problem with Metrobank. Maybe they think that they are too big to consider the concerns of small depositors who use the ATM. They really should look into their ATMs because their automated service really suck.