What a WUNCH of BANKERS

[johnofgwent]

Couple of points.



1)  I switched to HSBC and collected £175. Then one night my youngest sent a text asking for beer money, which i sent, then another later for something else, which i was not allowed to transfer. Turns out if you send a small amount and then a larger amount they think you're a victiim of fraud and block it for 24 hours. And make up all sorts of lies about why they did it. The Ombudsman got the truth out of them. Reward: Another £50 o say sorry.



2) Nine days before the original brexit day SAGA in the form of Allied Irish Bank sent me a snottygram demanding repayment of my SAGA credit Card Balance by the day before we leave as they were having no more to do with you british bastards we should have bombed properly back int he 70's. Well sort of. Next day a massive apology fropm SAGA about Allied Irish Banks arrogance. It took me 30 seconds to ask Virgin for a 30 month interst free money transfer for 2% of the (pretty minimal actually anyway) balance.  But I sent a real snottygram to the Ombudsman and last monthAIB sent a cringeing apology lying through their back teeth about the tone of their letter saying they never meant people to repay it they just had to stop using it. Apparently the ombudsman told them the average difference between the sAGA CARD'S APR OF 11.9% (YES, 11.9%) and everyone else's average 19.9% HAD to be paid out for a year on the closing balance as a penalty or else so here's £68 as 8% of the balance you repaid



3) BARCLAYS totally ignored my complaint until seven days after the referral to the ombudsman deadline and then rang me and the guy was quite offhand about their problems. He did not like how i put himn straight and when he heard I'd recorded our entire conversation and was about to sent the whole transcript to the ombudsman promised to get back to me. Next day they put £350 in my account to compensate me for the inconvenience....



4) RBS turned me down for one of those £175 accounts when i tried to move from HSBC ...

[Bright Young Thing]

As a fairly low paid Government worker, savings are an issue for me, along with big celebrations such as Christmas. I attempted the 'save 1p on day one, 2p on day 2, 3p on day 3 experiment last year but lasted less than a month - its okay at the start of the year but as time goes on it gets more and more costly. Saw a FaceAche post at the start of January which suggested saving £1 per day so I'm now doing a daily transfer - by early December I should have well over £300 which will certainly come in handy. Not missing a quid a day at all!



Of course the interest is crap, but I didn't expect anything else!

[cromwell]

I went into the Bank of AntandDec (what rubbish adverts) to pay in an unexpected cheque from HMRC today and made a bit of a quip to the cashier but it was wasted.



I had Mrs with me so I then explained that as they were reducing the interest rate on May 5th on their 123 account I want to change to a 123 Lite account instead. The difference is the Lite account costs £1 a month compared to the £5 a month for the standard. The cashier said that I wouldn't get the cashbacks which I get at the moment. She was incorrect, and I explained the difference was that there would be no interest on the current account, I would still get the cashbacks. She backed down. I was unsure whether she did not know the product or was giving me BS.

She said, "you won't get the interest on your current account", which I had just told HER!



They are reducing the interest rate from 1.5% to 1% and I can currently get 1.25% with the Coventry.

That would have cost me £100 in interest. She told me "Most people just leave their money where it is".  :roll:



She would not take instructions to do something in May. I needed to go back and do it on the day. I said, "You might have a long queue!"



I left the branch, went home and phoned customer services. I created a 123 Lite account online with their guidance to convert from the original account. I then moved all my excess capital to the Coventry Building Society.

That cashier's attitude has cost them most of my business. I am now considering changing banks later in the year.

I've been through most UK banks, I'll look for one of the £100 gift offers if I can find one.

Well if you never have had anything off  natwest they are offering £175 to switch,sadly we've exhausted all avenues bar Lloyds but they're offering nowt at the mo.

[Barry]

I went into the Bank of AntandDec (what rubbish adverts) to pay in an unexpected cheque from HMRC today and made a bit of a quip to the cashier but it was wasted.



I had Mrs with me so I then explained that as they were reducing the interest rate on May 5th on their 123 account I want to change to a 123 Lite account instead. The difference is the Lite account costs £1 a month compared to the £5 a month for the standard. The cashier said that I wouldn't get the cashbacks which I get at the moment. She was incorrect, and I explained the difference was that there would be no interest on the current account, I would still get the cashbacks. She backed down. I was unsure whether she did not know the product or was giving me BS.

She said, "you won't get the interest on your current account", which I had just told HER!



They are reducing the interest rate from 1.5% to 1% and I can currently get 1.25% with the Coventry.

That would have cost me £100 in interest. She told me "Most people just leave their money where it is".  :roll:



She would not take instructions to do something in May. I needed to go back and do it on the day. I said, "You might have a long queue!"



I left the branch, went home and phoned customer services. I created a 123 Lite account online with their guidance to convert from the original account. I then moved all my excess capital to the Coventry Building Society.

That cashier's attitude has cost them most of my business. I am now considering changing banks later in the year.

I've been through most UK banks, I'll look for one of the £100 gift offers if I can find one.

[johnofgwent]

All good fun and my apologies if I am repeating points already made but...



At the end of the day you are dealing with kids in call centres who are reading off scripts. If it is anything more complex than why has that shelving you promised that would be delivered by noon still not arrived ( what with it being 6 pm), there is very rarely any point in trying to resolve the matter by phone. The nice girl at the other end of the phone will just piss you about because nice girls are in the habit of pissing everybody else about.



Send a letter and an email and if you don't get a response repeat the process and do the same to your MP. The latter will do sod all but the folk you are dealing with won't know that and will sort the matter out.

yes but the trouble is, there is nowhere to send a letter. seriously. that is a fundamental part of my complaint to the ombudsman, the bank have reorganised and reorganised and now, nobody knows who i am or why i owe them money. i have been temped to shut off the direct debit and have done with it but there is still a legal charge on the deeds.

[Borchester]

All good fun and my apologies if I am repeating points already made but...



At the end of the day you are dealing with kids in call centres who are reading off scripts. If it is anything more complex than why has that shelving you promised that would be delivered by noon still not arrived ( what with it being 6 pm), there is very rarely any point in trying to resolve the matter by phone. The nice girl at the other end of the phone will just piss you about because nice girls are in the habit of pissing everybody else about.



Send a letter and an email and if you don't get a response repeat the process and do the same to your MP. The latter will do sod all but the folk you are dealing with won't know that and will sort the matter out.

[johnofgwent]

Well, today I am three hundred and fifty quid better off thanks to Barclays bribe to me to not have the regulator cut them a new arse

[Baron von Lotsov]

JoG they are incompetent.

Between 1973-1978 I worked for the NatWest bank. Just for your interest, we used Burroughs machines  and each machine was connected by private phone line to a concentrator. So about 10 branches (some had 2 or more machines) were connected to the concentrator at Northampton, All Saints branch. This concentrator was a bit techy and didn't like the heat, so would often drop it's programme and stop polling with the mainframe computer at Kegworth. This would mean me getting out the punch tape reel to re-programme the machine, which was the size of a double wardrobe to get all the branches back online again.

All the data for the day's work was processed overnight, there was no such thing as real time computing. Anyway, reminiscence over.



The customer bank statements were printed a a central location and sent out to branches to envelope up and send to customers. Sometimes we had to intercept these as during a days work a spurious error one day (perhaps an incorrectly credited sum) could not be put right till the next day.

Now, we might not really want the customer to see that, so we had to intercept the offending sheet and retype the statement.

AND I really mean re-type - using a darn typewriter with a black and red ribbon.

The correction had to be perfect. No tippex. No xxxx overtyping an error.

The time I spent doing these, only to throw them in the bin as at the last line a minor error or out of column tab entry - Arrgghhhh!!!



As you know, human beings are a funny old bunch and we do get things wrong in the banks. Nonetheless, the way you describe your experiences shows someone had tried really VERY HARD to get your instructions wrong.

I do hope they eventually get it right. I no longer have anything to do with Nat West as I've since been with Barclays, then First Direct then eventually  to the Spanish owned Santander that gives 1.5% on current account deposits.

Wow, what a fascinating story. I used to use those cash machines and use banks at about that time, and remember the word on the street was, always check your statements. One wondered why, since one knew they were computerised, but I've always had a feeling about it, and at long last you reveal why. It seems technical incompetence in this country has always been the way of things. When I went to university, we were taught to program, and we would have to use one of those prehistoric machines. It would take about five minutes to compile about 30 lines. I thought, these guys are insane. How can anyone work on a machines that is so decrepit?

[johnofgwent]

I wish the sort of digital recording technology i have on my phone right now was around in 1983



Our first mortgage taken out in april 1983 was with natwest bank, it was a 100% low cost endowment mortgage offered to me on the basis that my then salary of £8,500 plus moira's of £3,500 was enough to give us a mortgage of £39000 so the £24,850 i wanted was no problem. Being the eagle eyed software tester i was, I quickly spotted the low cost endowment only guaranteed £16,500 of that £24,850 apart from death benefits.



I naturally queried this and was told to my face the balance would be made up of profit returned by the endowment policy. And when I said "but what if it doesn't" and the insurance company rep, for a bunch called the Life Association of Scotland, said outright in front of the bank manager who was dealing with the application in person (they did, in those days) "son, you don't think we would let you apply for this if we were not absolutely certain it would more than cover the mortgage do you ......"



If only i'd got that on tape.



We dumped Natwest after moira's mum died. She made moira - an only child - her executor and because at the time moira had no bank account of her own they refused to accept her as her mother's executor and refused to release the estate (a couple of hundred quid in a natwest savings account) to her.



But the finest natwest fuckup i ever stood back and roared with laughter at came about in the last decade.



Back in about 2004, Barclays bank's mainframe system in London had a gigantic hiccup and shit at the same time that royally screwed over the Information Centre of Excellence data warehouse and reporting system that did all the branch balances UK wide from an industrial estate in warwickshire. I was up there freelancing and the first i knew about it was when my phone went ape at about 11pm offering me silly money to get my arse back out of bed and man the bilge pumps.



On arrival at the site we quickly found the biggest problem was the transactions coming into the data centre were overwhelming the attempts of the database server to restore itself. So six of us went to the boss and told her to do the unthinkable.



We pulled the plug and for three hours - probably more actually, from about one am no transactions moved into or out of the data centre, they were all buffered at satellite sites, and the transactions kept in the banks suspense account, giving the illusion that all was well, whereas in fact .....



After what was probably the second or third longest couple of hours in my life ever the transaction logs restored and we could start releasing transactions into the centre from the satellite sites. It took a day or so for the system to recover, and within weeks a whole load of people sat down in an upper level of canary wharf to make bloody sure it never, EVER happenned again short of the data centre being nuked (in which case the backup buildings on the other side of the world will kick in inside 15 minutes, you can thank Osama Bin Liner for that)



So, do you remember that spate of difficulty natwest had about five years ago now, maybe further back than that, whereby for about a week to a fortnight nothing worked properly after a system update went biblically wrong ? Well, guess who didn't have the nerve to take the decision I and five of my fellow DBA's told Barclays to take back then. The system was simply overwhelmed by the incoming transactions that totally messed with the system's attempts to recover the "journals AND IT TOOK WEEKS FOR THEM TO SORT IT OUT.

[Barry]

JoG they are incompetent.

Between 1973-1978 I worked for the NatWest bank. Just for your interest, we used Burroughs machines  and each machine was connected by private phone line to a concentrator. So about 10 branches (some had 2 or more machines) were connected to the concentrator at Northampton, All Saints branch. This concentrator was a bit techy and didn't like the heat, so would often drop it's programme and stop polling with the mainframe computer at Kegworth. This would mean me getting out the punch tape reel to re-programme the machine, which was the size of a double wardrobe to get all the branches back online again.

All the data for the day's work was processed overnight, there was no such thing as real time computing. Anyway, reminiscence over.



The customer bank statements were printed a a central location and sent out to branches to envelope up and send to customers. Sometimes we had to intercept these as during a days work a spurious error one day (perhaps an incorrectly credited sum) could not be put right till the next day.

Now, we might not really want the customer to see that, so we had to intercept the offending sheet and retype the statement.

AND I really mean re-type - using a darn typewriter with a black and red ribbon.

The correction had to be perfect. No tippex. No xxxx overtyping an error.

The time I spent doing these, only to throw them in the bin as at the last line a minor error or out of column tab entry - Arrgghhhh!!!



As you know, human beings are a funny old bunch and we do get things wrong in the banks. Nonetheless, the way you describe your experiences shows someone had tried really VERY HARD to get your instructions wrong.

I do hope they eventually get it right. I no longer have anything to do with Nat West as I've since been with Barclays, then First Direct then eventually  to the Spanish owned Santander that gives 1.5% on current account deposits.

[Baron von Lotsov]

Hmm well there was an FT business report on British industry that I found on Youtube last night. FT people are usually pretty intelligent so we get a report on a few good examples of British industry, such as the washing powder that uses less water. I've got to say there were some good ideas and so-forth, but one lament was, we as a nation come up with fantastic ideas, but fail to commercialise them. That is of course very true, but the thinking did not stop to ponder the possible reasons for this well-established observation.



I had to give these guys a 101 on selling stuff. I can't say I'm that hot as a salesman, but talking from the customer, I had a few things to say. I guess you do as well. It's obvious stuff like we want prices and spec, and we do not like our time to be wasted, and therefore we do not like to fill in long forms that pass all our details over to the sales department so they can cold call us and interrupt our work. I'd feel i were being insulting if i ran through the whole list of things customers don't like and the things they do like, but who knows, maybe one day they will get it. British Industry is not thought of anything like as highly abroad as it is in the places where they do it. My conclusion is that it is what they teach them at universities which is wrong. They all make the same mistakes.

[johnofgwent]

What follows is the text of my case just raised through MoneySavingExpert's reccomended "resolver" financial issue resolution site.



Enjoy.



I'm off up the pub because as you'll see by the time you get to the end of this, there are no bloody words, and I need a stiff gin or six and I need to drink it in the company of others....



-------------------------------------------





Dear Sir / Madam,



I am writing to you to raise an issue about: Mortgages



The issue that I have experienced was: As you will eventually find when you finally locate the paperwork for the above account, I have a Mortgage with you in respect of my home address which matures in April 2022.



This account comprises sub-account #4, about thirty odd thousand pounds of interest only mortgage, which is more than covered by the tax free lump components of my various personal pensions entered into over the years, plus two REPAYMENT loans, #5 and #6, one taken out when we moved home in 1997, covering the then price difference between the home we sold and the one we moved into, and the other added when we had a Dormer Loft Extension put on the house shortly after the turn of the millenium.



A few months ago I received a small inheritance and wished to use part of it to reduce the REPAYMENT component of the above account.



I have in the past had all sorts of problems communicating with anyone in regard to this account, because it is I believe one of a vanishingly small number of such that you still operate, and its support has been "amalgamated" into a front end team who clearly know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about it, as evidenced by the fact the automated call answering robot does not even recognise the above account number.



After a frustrating ten minutes trying to get your robot to shut up and let me talk to a human, I finally got through to someone, who quickly admitted that my mortgage was NOT serviced by their centre despite the annual statement giving their number as the place to contact in case of enquiry. The woman I spoke to did, however put me through to the team that ACTUALLY dealt with the type of account I have, a"Summit" mortgage I think it is referred to as.



Depressingly, it all to soon became clear this second person, although supposedly dealing with my mortgage account, actually had absolutely no idea whatsoever how to handle my enquiry. At one point she actually said I would have to get my home RE-VALUED before they could accept my part repayment of the account, a claim I found so absurd and preposterous I burst out laughing.



EVENTUALLY however I did manage to explain to this woman WHAT i wanted to do. I was utterly explicit in my telephone call, which I hope you have recorded, because you'll need it. I explicitly stated that the account was split into three sub accounts, that one of them was an interest only mortgage that will be settled when I activate my personal pension's tax free lump sum release when I reconfigure the pension for payment as I choose, and that I now wished to make a payment of FIVE THOUSAND POUNDS which I believed from the last annual statement in front of me would destroy one of the repayment accounts and make some inroads into the other.



After a few moments delay this woman came back to say it was not possible to accept payment over the phone to repay this sum on this account, but that if I were to make a payment to a sort code and account number she supplied, quoting the above reference, she would "send a note" to the team administering the account and get this payment made.



I must admit I did wonder if I was actually funding a Romanian Sex Slave Cartel but I did make a payment to that sort code and account number.



I was, I must admit, relieved when a few days later I received a letter from Barclays Mortgages advising me that my payment of five thousand pounds had been received.



My relief, however, turned to incandescent anger in a pretty short measure when it became obvious you had applied my payment NOT to destroy the repayment component as I explicitly instructed, but instead to reduce the interest only component.



As a result of this failure to do as I instructed, my monthly payment commitment has not reduced by the hundred or so pounds I expected, but has instead reduced by some sixty five pence.



There are no words.



Except to consider that the collective noun for a room full of bankers, at least at Barclays, is clearly a "wunch"



It occurred on: 10/11/2019



This meant that INCANDESCENTLY ANGRY



Not only are you not giving me any proper customer support contact for my mortgage which is coming up to repayment, in that the centre you demand I contact know absolutely nothing of it, when I give them clear, explicit instructions on the details of an early repayment i wish to make, you fail miserably to follow it and do the exact opposite of what I want.



I want you to undo what you just did, and apply the five thousand pounds that I sent you to clear down one, and reduce the other, of the REPAYMENT components of the above mortgage account, and thus reduce my monthly outgoings by something approaching one hundred pounds instead of the sixty odd pence reduction that has been achieved by repaying part of the interest only loan.



I look forward to your prompt response on this matter. As recommended by Trading Standards, I would like to keep a complete record of my case, so please reply to this email address.



Yours faithfully,