This report comes from the UK. It shows how well HSBC customer service in India understands what the customer is saying. Customer service failed to provide the correct answer:

Graham and Julia Davies, from Bolton, recently received a Visa debit card for their joint HSBC account. They decided to use this to pay for the cost of a rail holiday in France because paying by credit card would have incurred a 1.5% transaction fee.

“I decided to check that I would be covered by Chargeback if anything happened to the holiday company we were booking through,” says Graham. “I rang the ‘from overseas’ number on the back of my card and, after some delay while the HSBC rep made enquiries, he came back and claimed that HSBC had no liability. So I then called the head office freephone number and the rep, without reference to anyone else, claimed that Visa Chargeback did not exist for debit cards.”

A spokesman for HSBC says its Visa cards are covered by the Chargeback scheme and that its staff may have made a mistake. Although mistakes are also made by other card issuers, HSBC and First Direct customers should be particularly alert in the next year as the banks - which are part of the same group - are at the beginning of a 16-month process of switching all their current account customers from Maestro to Visa debit cards.

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5. Merchants with HSBC credit card terminals see fee increase