Banks

[Panda with issues...]

After having a brief discussion in another thread, I've been having a lot of problems with natwest recently, and was thinking about changing my bank.

Does anyone actually know a GOOD bank?

Please, feel free to detail how sucky your bank is, add personal experiences of crap financiers etc. Just let it all out. Maybe this is a case of choosing the 'least worst'.

GO!

 

[Dr Drae]

Santander have a habit of locking your card every time you pay for anything. More than ten times this year. Twice on charity donations, and even another couple in the past two weeks on Christmas shopping. They're secure, I'll give 'em that. But it get's a little frustrating.

 

[waterproofbob]

I love Natwest, I know people who have had issues with them. I also on the other hand know a lot of people that have changed to them and been happier. I've never had an issue with them.

I have heard from a few people that HSBC are pretty good. I'd say I've heard more horror stories about Barclays than I have anyone else, both from people I've spoken to at work and friends as well.

 

[Wol]

ugh. barclays are stupid. Took liz ages to just get a printout of her statements. Nationwide (me) could do them in the branch.

I've personally got everything at the moment with nationwide, and I've never really had a problem with them. They blocked my card last month as it turned out I used my card in a chip and pin thing that Visa had told them was "compromised". They could have told me that they were going to block my card the week before I was moving house.

apart from that ive found them fine. Depends if you want a bank or building society, or don't really care!

 

[Gombol]

I love Natwest, I know people who have had issues with them. I also on the other hand know a lot of people that have changed to them and been happier. I've never had an issue with them.

I have heard from a few people that HSBC are pretty good. I'd say I've heard more horror stories about Barclays than I have anyone else, both from people I've spoken to at work and friends as well.

HSBC are shite. £1 a day if you go into your overdraft or somthing (Might of been Halifax..Either way, avoid them both.)

I went with Barclays, since my parents are with them and they said they were really good. (They WERE with Halifax, but the moment they introduced the money-per-day for overdraft, they left.) Granted, Barclays have like a 1% a day on overdraft, but it's such little amounts you barely notice,

 

[thatbloke]

I think it's always a case of "least worst" with banks

I have only ever been with one bank myself, Halifax. Parents made me an account with em when I was a ickle babby and have had the same one ever since...

Never had many problems with them tbh. Overdrafts with them can be expensive, if you are one who frequently needs/uses an overdraft, they will do an ARRANGED overdraft of up to £300 fee-free, then if you use an ARRANGED overdraft of between £300-£2500 it costs £1 every day you are over £300. After £2500 it's £2 a day for arranged, but if you go into an unauthorised overdraft they will charge you £5/day.

...and their "ultimate reward" account is also a load of bollocks - you can get an account with the same/similar interest rate but without costing you £12.50 a month - they will try offering you this (they give you £5 a month! - except that it costs you £12.50...) but take a look at the small print on the "benefits" - the personal breakdown cover, for instance, would be good to have, except that it's only valid if you break down within 10 miles of your home. And the mobile phone "insurance" is also sub-par, though I can't remember off the top of my head why I laughed that one off.

In terms of the actual rates and things that you get, I have no idea. I have never bothered to look at the numbers.

The online facilities are decent, and I've never had a problem with the online/phone banking, and also in branches they have these auto-deposit machines that I've never seen in other banks that allow you to deposit cash into your halifax account and have it instantly available without you having to queue for the counter service. None of this stuffing crap into enevlopes, you literally put your card in, tell if whether you are doing cash or cheques or both, put what you have into a slot, it counts up how much there is and then gets you to confirm that, then on confirmation it spits out your card and your receipt and the funds are instantly available. You can do the same with cheques, though obviously they are subject to clearing still.

EDIT:

I addition I thought I should add that I've never had my card blocked - if you go abroad they want you to tell them first but as long as you do that your card can be freely used in your destination for the dates you give them without fear of your card being blocked.

...ok I lied - card did get blocked once, it was gobbled by a cash machine - this was after I had recently moved and the bank had some mail that was sent to my old address returned by the new occupants before I changed my address with them. a quick trip to the counter, asked why my card had been gobbled and 3 days later a new card was on my doorstep. That's another thing - they have always stated "7 working days" for new cards but whenever i've asked for a new one it's been 3 days later that it has arrived

 

[Iron_fist]

i've found HBOS to generally be ok very few issues with either my cash card or my current accout with them.
OTOH their credit card is starting to piss me off a bit, i've had different payment due dates each of the last 4-5 months so it's turning into a pain to track when it's due to be paid. oh and it seems to be refused when using it online, which is half the reason i got it in the first place, the first may be my own fault, but the latter is just annoying

 

[Ronin Storm]

I'll echo my dissatisfaction with Barclays, both on grounds of poor customer service after (their) mistakes, and poor processes for handling changes, such as change of address. I can change my address for all my banks online, except Barclays. When I can disentangle my finances from Barclays I will go somewhere else.

Rojaws has had no problems with First Direct, which is an internet guise of HSBC. To date, I've not heard anything particularly poor said of HSBC in any specifics.

In a limited way, I've also had some success with Cahoot, which is an internet guise of Santander (now; was someone else when I originally took out the account).

 

[Panda with issues...]

...ok I lied - card did get blocked once, it was gobbled by a cash machine - this was after I had recently moved and the bank had some mail that was sent to my old address returned by the new occupants before I changed my address with them. a quick trip to the counter, asked why my card had been gobbled and 3 days later a new card was on my doorstep. That's another thing - they have always stated "7 working days" for new cards but whenever i've asked for a new one it's been 3 days later that it has arrived

You see, I've been trying to get a new card from Natwest for one of my accounts for over 3 months. They suck.

 

[Wraith]

From a personal standpoint I'm with HSBC and I've never had any problems with them. Others have said their cards have been stopped for unusual purchases but with me HSBC have simply delayed the payments until they could contact me and confirm that they were legitimate, at which point they released the payment promptly. Minimal hassle for me but still good for security.

I work as an accountant so I've seen quite a lot of the different ways that various banks deal with their customers (albeit these are business accounts so may be slightly different but I doubt their practices differ too much between business and personal accounts). From that experience Barclays seem to give their customers the most grief, followed by Lloyds TSB, but I have seen people having problems with most of the banks at some point or another.

 

[Tempscire]

I've been with Nationwide for the past 20 years and I've never had a single problem with them. Only thing (which I actually count as a plus) is that they blocked my card as someone had cloned it. They manager to stop all buy 1 transaction and the one they didn't manage to stop was refunded immediately. Had it back in my bank 20 mins from calling them.

You can also take money out in foreign countries for free as long as it's a LINK ATM (which most of them are).

I cant recommend them highly enough.

 

[DeZmond]

For what it's worth, I've had an account with RBS since '93, and never had any problems with them - only slight issue was when I was in India, my card got temporarily stopped on account of fraud monitoring, but a quick phone call straightened everything out.

Part of what makes it a good bank for me is that there's a branch a few minutes down the road with local staff who I know, but of course I live in Scotland so the experience will probably be different in England. Also, I reckon the online banking service they offer is pretty decent, very easy to use and can also export data as excel or other formats of data in a few clicks.

 

[Ghostwolf67]

Lloyds TSB are ok. TBH i've never demanded alot out of them so i dont know how they deal in a crisis. Nothing has ever really gone wrong.

Though they did ruin a fraud attempt early last year which was nice of them.

 

[lucius101]

I'm so not telling people what i do for a living or where i work

 

[Tingham]

They are a building society, I know but...

Skipton Building Society have their head office where I live, in Skipton. They have always been superb with me, and my family. They are Brilliant with the town, sponsor it's students and sporting events, and have one of the highest customer satisfaction scores of not just any bank/building society, but any British company.

 

[Windzarko]

Lloyds TSB are ok. TBH i've never demanded alot out of them so i dont know how they deal in a crisis. Nothing has ever really gone wrong.

Though they did ruin a fraud attempt early last year which was nice of them.

This pretty much sums up my experiences with Lloyds as well; I've not had any major enough crisis situations to tell how well they respond to them, but in all my day-to-day activities, they've never given me any real troubles.

Their anti-fraud stuff kicked in once for me when I was trying to add some credit to my previous phone (pay-as-you-go updating over the phone), on the same day where I'd made numerous very small (all under £5) transactions with the card, and the anti-fraud kicked in and blocked me updating my credit; a mild pain at the time, but I was able to update the next day, and when I asked in the bank what was up with it, I was told that minor instances of that can happen and clear up quickly, wheras continued issues would have raised a flag and caused them to quickly contact me to check if everything was okay.

My only real qualm with them at all? For any of their online stuff that you can do, your password can only be alphanumeric, no punctuation or other such characters. For some this might be a throw-away complaint, but I personally don't like having important passwords being restricted like that, and I daresay a few others here might feel the same way.

But yeah, TL;DR: Lloyds TSB seem pretty good, but you'd have to ask someone who's been to the crunch with them for more info.

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

Ive had problems with TSB, i have a visa debit card with them, so you can imagine my suprise when they wrote to me to tell me i was £60 overdrawn...

When i went in i was fairly pissed since i didnt ask to borrow money, (the cause was several preorders coinciding with multiple small orders). They charge alot for overdrawing, which is fucked up since i didnt have a credit card with them.

Does it makes sense to have a debit card that gets overdrawn. Not to me.

(To top that i told them to remove the ability to be overdrawn, yet it happened one more time, now i have an uncessary 2k buffer on a debit card, sort of beats the point of it being a debit card.)

 

[Doxbee]

I recently spent 2 days trying to telephone my branch of the RBS. The phone would just ring out, unanswered, with no facility to leave a message. Eventually I walked into a local branch to deal with my situation. When I mentioned the phone problem at my branch, the cashier wasn't surprised and told me that it was happening a lot. The staff levels at their branch had been reduced from 12 to 6 people due to 'cuts'. What a cruddy way to run a business. I'm seriously considering the shoe-box-full-of-cash-under-the-bed option for my financial transaction needs.

 

[Xylak]

Banks are run by bastards trained by bastards.
That is all.

/non-constructive comment is non-constructive.