18 April (Part 2) - Why are banks so bloody awful?
The weird and slightly disappointing thing about writing this blog is that
off-topic rants usually get
a bigger response than a laborious Council meeting report. (Another is due tomorrow.)
So here I go again. It involves my friend in Bromley who is very deaf. She gets
by on her current hearing aid (Boots, about £2,000) which she finds to be much better than all their
predecessors. She can hear conversation with the assistance of a bit of lip
reading when directed straight at her, but the telephone is a total
no-go area.
These days she tends to let certain things slide a bit and when helping her tidy
up old papers a couple of weeks ago I found a letter from the Kent Reliance Building Society dated
July 2021 which told her that as she had not used her account for more than six
years they were going to deactivate it unless they heard from her. She ignored it.
Kent Reliance Building Socety
A
further search of the old papers turned up what looked like log-in details
from 2013. At the second attempt I managed to log in and reactivate the account. It was paying a decent rate of interest, nearly four times as much as she
was getting from a Santander ISA so using the on-line facilities I initiated an ISA
transfer. Unfortunately the website said that Santander transfers were not
automated and I must download a form and post it to Kent. The link was broken
and an apology popped up so
I sent an email to Kent Reliance on 10th April to ask what should be done. Not as easy as it
sounds because the email address on the Contact page provoked an instant bounce back.
I found another but to this day I have not heard a word. On Day 5 I asked the same question via the
on-line chat facility. There was no reply so yesterday
(Day 7) I tried a phone call.
The security questions were a nightmare because I had to listen to them and
relay each one to my deaf friend and ask her to speak the answer. Account
number, name, date of birth, address etc.
Sometimes I pointed to the answer on her documentation to try to speed things
up. At the end of the rigmarole she was told that she had failed the
security checks and not allowed to ask why. She has a very significant sum
invested in the Kent Reliance Building Society but they were happy to pee
everyone off and risk an account closure. The operative appeared to be going out
of his way to be obnoxious.
My suspicion is that when my friend stumbled over her address and I pointed to it printed on the
Society’s letter and prompted, “the line beginning with 23” it was against the rules.
The ridiculous thing is that if I had dragged some random woman off the
street and put the Kent documents in front of her, there would be no problem.
Impersonators are acceptable, the genuine article isn’t.
My friend’s deafness is registered with Kent Reliance and
only a week ago they assured both me and her that she will get extra assistance. A worthless promise.
By coincidence I opened an account with the Kent Reliance in March and sent an
opening deposit of £5 to test the system. It never arrived. After many phone
calls the Kent Reliance admitted that they had given me the details of someone
else’s account. The sixth, or thereabouts, person I spoke to had a brain and got
to the bottom of it. How in Hell can they issue me a wrong account number? All is well now.
In further proof of banking incompetency, the ISA has now been transferred. The
form they said must be filled in and sent to them never has been, nor did
they send the promised transfer documentation or acknowledge the email or the follow up ‘chat’ message.
Maybe we should have cut our losses and left such an incompetent bunch.
My current account provider is much cleverer. They use voice recognition on the
very few occasions I have to call them.
Santander
There
was too much money with Santander earning 1% in two accounts (three including
the transferred ISA) and nothing at all in
another. Time for some transfers. I set up a payment to a third building society which
offered a much higher rate of interest and sent the customary £5 test payment.
It arrived OK so I went back to Santander to transfer some more. I had to raise
the transfer limit but that was OK too.
Thus encouraged, I set up a second payment authority but when I attempted to
transfer more money the website said I was blocked and I must phone. Both payment
authorities were to bank accounts in the same name as the Santander customer and
verified as such by the Santander website. It had also sent the
log-in codes to my friend’s phone - eight times in total!
The talk to a deaf person routine all over again?
My friend does not want to be subjected to the trauma. So now I have to go to
Santander on Monday to get things back on the road and transfer most of the
money from their 1% and 0% accounts to something better. Another bank which
delights in scaring away good six figure customers.
To everyone who thinks ‘Power of Atorney’; there is one registered but when did
any bank take any notice of one?
MBNA Credit Card
This
is nothing to do with my Bromley friend,
it is all mine. Last year I spent more than £30,000 on my MBNA card. Not all my
money I hasten to add. Among other things, I built several high specification
desktop computers for friends and relations. So the money was a long way from being all mine.
On the Saturday before Christmas I arranged for a local tradesman to deliver
goods to my door with a price tag of circa £1,500. When he arrived and installed
the goods I went to pay by card as pre-arranged. It was declined. I then found a text message
on my phone which said that if I opened the MBNA phone app I could authorise the
payment. I did so and another text message said that if I repeated the same transaction it would go
though. It didn’t. Not another word was heard from MBNA.
Somewhat embarrassed by the man waiting patiently at my door for payment I
thought I would phone MBNA only to discover that they do not allow phone
contact, only the chat facility which would not be answered until the following Monday.
I have not used my MBNA Credit Card since. Various traders’, Amazon etc. default
payment options all changed. I don’t know how much MBNA earns on £30,000 of purchases
but you have to hit these customer disregarding cretins where it hurts.