Take Two

Why, why, why do the banks in this country insist on staying put in the dark ages?

I make regular payment from my Norwegian bank account (student loan installments and misc other tidbits). I have to occasionally top that account up to avoid them coming after me with crowbars and bicycle chains. Visiting an HSBC branch in Clerkenwell today I asked about arranging a money transfer to Norway at regular intervals. This wasn’t possible, they said, because Norway was not on the list they had of countries you could set up standing orders to (and by the way, this would have costed me 9 pounds a time).

What can I do instead then? Ah, each time I want to make a transfer I could call their phone banking service and give them all the details necessary to set up the transfer. All the necessary information. Each time I wanted to do a transfer. No thanks. Well, actually I could live with this if I could do it over Internet. Adding insult to injury however I can’t arrange to do this over the Internet, nor at a branch but only by phone. The least secure option. Oh, and by the way this costs 21 pounds per transfer.

That sucks, I say (in a slightly more polite wording). Why can’t I at least record the information of the transfer with you once and just phone up, authenticate myself and say “Go” whenever I want a transfer to go ahead? “That wouldn’t work”, they say. And why not? “Because you wouldn’t need to transfer the same amount of money each time.”

I’m sorry? You’ve seen me for the first time in your life 2 minutes ago, you don’t know anything about me, not even my name! This is not how service works, you see. I’m the customer, so I tell you what I want to do and you tell me if it can be done or how I can best accomplish something similar.

Up until now the best way around British banks’ stupidity on this matter I’ve found is to withdraw a sizeable amount of money at an ATM when I happen to find myself in Norway, then walking directly into a branch and paying it into my account. This works. I find myself making fewer and fewer trips there, though, so this is not going to be a workable solution. It also relies on me having a healthy balance at the time I’m over there, which is a bad assumption to make about vacation time. Airline tickets tend to strain the budget.

I guess I get so worked up about these things because I know it doesn’t have to be this way: having money transferred here from my Norwegian account (with Nordea if anybody’s interested) was a breeze. When my student loan arrived I just logged into my online banking account and set up the transfer to my UK account. Ok, so there was an additional fee. Oh, and I needed some extra codes to identify the foreign bank and country, but all that information was available on their site. The important bit is that I didn’t have to talk to any humans and I could set it up in my own home at any hour I was comfortable with. This has been possible for at least 4 years, so it’s nothing new; maybe in 6-7 years British banks will follow. They will of course claim that they are the among the early adopters.

I’m getting sick of the British banks’ self-gratification. They’re saying that Britain is one of the first countries to make use of this “new” chip-and-pin system, where you identify yourself by a pin-code instead of by signature when you’re buying goods at shops.

What they fail to mention is that they are more than 10 years (at least) behind other countries. Flashback to Norway 10 years ago, long before I even thought about moving to Britain. I had a bank account with a VISA debit card, and I never had to sign when purchasing stuff. I always tapped in my pin-code.

I don’t know how much longer they’ve had that arrangement over there because I was too young to have a debit card much before that. It was pretty common to use plastic payment options though, so I imagine it’d been in place for a while.

Ok, I should shut up now. I’ve ranted enough for one day.

And here I was thinking the people I currently bank with are incompetent. Turns out that the Co-operative bank aren’t much better. Okay, so they have have a website that works in non-IE browsers, and you can call them 24/7 and talk to a person. However, because of their absolutely hopeless processing of my application for an account, I won’t be banking with them.

I started out in late January, going to their branch in Islington High street to apply for an account (I went into the branch so I could show them my proofs of address and identity in person — I don’t feel comfortable sending away original documents). The first problem I had was that the branch wasn’t there. I called them up again, and they confirmed that the branch was at 1 Islington High street, which was obviously not true. I later found the branch a few hundred yards down the road.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to let details like that to stop me. I went in to apply for an account and was taken care of by a pleasant clerk. After keying in my application he took copies of my details which we both signed. Then he went to fax them over to the head office, and when he returned I headed off to a GLLUG meeting, quite pleased with how painless it had been.

I didn’t hear anything from the bank for weeks, so I called them up to get a status report. They said they were waiting for my proof of address and identity. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow the head office never got my details. Or so they said, and blamed the branch for losing them.

I’m not easily put off, so I decided to give them another chance. By now my application had timed out, so they had to duplicate it. This was easy enough; they could do that on the phone. Now I only had to go and flash my details again. For this I went to their branch in Watford. First impression was better than for the Islington one; at least it’s located where they say it is.

The lady I met there was very apologetic, was understanding when I said that this time I wanted to wait until I got the confirmation that the fax were sent before I left. She understood that I wanted this, she said, but then she said that their fax service wasn’t operational on weekends. This struck me as incredibly weird, but who am I to argue. I got her personal number so I could call on if there was any trouble.

This far so good; when I called their telephone service on the following Tuesday they had received the fax with my details. They were currently waiting to be processed by the team that did that kind of thing. Fine.

Then, yesterday I got a letter saying this (errors and all):

We still need to see confirmation of your proof of identity. Please send us 1 original documents issued within the last three months, from different companies, from the list below.

a Bank, building society, credit union, credit card statements
b Payslip from current employer

By now I was really annoyed. This wasn’t lessened when I called them up to query them about it; turned out the application number they had quoted me on this last letter was not my application number but belonged to someone else. Ok, I thought, this was the drop; now I’m furious. Mixing up my details with someone else’s is not to be taken lightly when done by a bank. I decided to not bank with them.

However, being royally pissed off I still wanted to find out what on earth they thought was wrong with my details, as I had brought much more information than they asked for in the first place, including (but not limited to): Passport, payslips, bank statements, drivers license, utility bill & letter from the tax office. They said that because my passport was Norwegian, they couldn’t use it, and they therefore had only three pieces of id. They were adamant that they’d only received four pieces, so I can only assume that the female clerk got tired of feeding my copies through the fax and omitted ones she thought were not important.

Phew. I really needed to blow off a bit of steam; this ordeal really got me worked up.