Nat West

[watervole]

I looked up Nat West in the phone book and rang the number. A friendly English voice replied "Nat West, Broadstone".

I have to go into Broadstone anyway to speak to Barclays in person. While I'm there, I'm also going to look at what it would cost me (it'll be several hundred quid to move the mortgage, but it may be worth it) to move all my banking to Nat West.

Comments

[paranoidangel]

I know all banks are crap by definition, but my mum's had no end of problems with Nat West. If it was less hassle she'd be moving away from them!

[watervole.livejournal.com]

What sort of problems has she had?

[paranoidangel]

I checked with her and she said:

"Natwest - well they change their minds about accepting cheques other than Natwest ones when I try to pay my bills. Barclays don't have a problem.

When I pay the Mastercard bill Barclays check that all the cheques and any cash add up to the total bill. Natwest don't do this and once I stupidly wrote the correct amount in words but put the wrong amount in numbers. Natwest just paid the smaller amount out. I made a mistake recently and Barclays phoned and asked if I could possibly go back and pay in the missing amount. When I checked with Natwest and wanted to look at the cheque I had written to see if it was my mistake or theirs they wanted to charge me!!!! I kicked up a fuss and was let off the £5 charge but only for that time.

Then we have the time I paid in your cheque when you were at uni and the pratts credited my account with 99p instead of £9.99."

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

I don't like Natwest. Their online banking system frequently confounds me, and until relatively recently it forced you to use either IE or an old version of Netscape (it still doesn't work in Safari). If they now allow you to telephone your local branch, that must be a change in policy because the last time I tried to talk to them, the local number forwarded to a call centre operative who insisted there was no way for me to talk to somebody at my local branch other than physically going there. Only apathy has prevented me from moving away from them several times, and I no longer use their credit card after their stupidity nearly stranded me with no money in a foreign country.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Actually although I agree with you on the bulk of this the website seems to be a lot better than it was.

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

Yes, it used to be atrocious, now it's merely poor...

They have this annoying login procedure where you have to enter a ten digit customer number, select three random numbers from a four digit PIN number, then select three random characters from a (in my case 12 character) alphanumeric password. If you get it wrong twice, they permanently lock you out of the system. At one time (as I discovered the hard way), the lockout was silent - it would let you keep trying and trying, and it would just tell you you'd got the password wrong every time. When I phoned the customer support number to say it wouldn't let me in, they asked for the answers to various security questions that I'm sure I've never given them (memorable dates and suchlike), then the operator got annoyed with me for not knowing the answers and said he would send a new activation code out by second class post. The customer number is made up of your date of birth and a sequential serial number. I imagine it would be trivially easy to enter the serial number part wrong and lock out somebody else who happens to share your birthday. Just to twist the knife a bit further, they automatically log you out after a few minutes of inactivity, so if I go away to check my credit card statement on another site then come back to the Natwest system, I frequently find that it's logged me out and I have to go through the whole annoying login procedure again.

They also have a habit of regularly disabling the online bill payment service "for security reasons" - usually when I have an important bill I want to pay.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I still haven't been able to move my UK bank account's branch details from Southampton to Bristol. NatWest still keeps sending stuff to my Southampton address. And the online banking is a *pain*. I also had the same problem as Alex, not being able to ring the local branch but having to go there. Sigh. The paperwork is silly as well, but I suspect that's the British system in general. I'm used to doing just about everything electronically up here.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

I've always had good service from the Co-op and they're ethical.

[kerravonsen]

Good point. Smaller banks and credit unions (I assume the co-op is something like this) have a tendency to have better customer service because it isn't a huge faceless beaurocracy. The downside can be that they don't have some services that big banks do.

If you really want to change banks (which is a HUGE hassle, I know) then it would be worth shopping around if you can. I mean, if there's only two banks locally then the shopping list would be very small (sigh).

Unfortunately for me, the Bank of Melbourne, which I went with because they had good customer service (open on Saturday mornings for example) went and got bought by one of the Big Banks. So we now have all the horrible account features of Big Banks (they charge you for everything) but at least they're still open on Saturday mornings.