Evolution of banking services in Mauritius

A lot of my client book via Paypal ... the fact that you can link it to your juice accounts makes a breeze to use ... make sure to incorporate transaction fee in your payment

JUICE is kinda like FPS in HK that you can pay bills; pay shops; transfer to friends/family member when both parties have MCB account.

Not sure how many HSBC user here. HSBC does not have the same feature like JUICE but it allows me to transfer funds (with limits) to any bank in Mauritius without any charges. Wonder any other banks here have the same feature.

Recently at my bank: I just wanted to place a standing order for my rent payment. In Europe, this can be done online in less than 5 minutes. Here I waited 45 minutes, even though there was only one customer in front of me. A total of 6 employees in the bank, 2 of them behind the counter, one responsible only for loans, but only one was processing customer requests.

Setting up my standing order took another 35 minutes, because everything is always entered into the system by hand and also entered into forms. There was no sign of digitalisation far and wide.

There seems to be a big gap between the opening statement that started this thread and customer experience as per Novalis1! Where does the truth lie? My main query -which I believe will be shared by the majority of ex-pats - is what is he most cost-effective way of transferring funds on a monthly basis from one's country of origin to Mauritius? I have a feeling that this depends more on the financial regulations which apply to the banks at the country of origin than in Mauritius but would be interested in responses in this forum. This surely is the more pertinent question as investment returns in Mauritius are far lower than those in some other countries, so leaving your main capital invested overseas and transferring all or part of the monthly investment return to Mauritius would be the route to go. However, if the costs in doing so degrades the actual money that you receive in Mauritius too much it becomes less attractive but maybe there's a better way?

I dont see any ’rapid advances’ when i go into MCB to withdraw cash from my MCB account. i still have to fill out a paper form ! pen and paper for a simple cash withdrawal is from 20 years ago.

I am a former bank manager in South Africa. While I do see some technology progress in banking in Mauritius it is still far behind the banks in South Africa.

Yes, its at least 10 yrs behind UK banking too.