Why I’m not switching my bank

My bank ( RBS UK ) is being sold to Santander, so I have no choice in the the matter. I either do nothing and “enjoy” the worst customer service available, according to Which? surveys or actively move account.

I am dreading it, because the move will be so much hard work with many likely points of failure.
I do not mean the direct debits and standing orders – which are easy enough for the “system” to identify and change. It is all the other connections that no-one else can identify and reassign for me.

Firstly there are direct credits, from dividends and interest paying savings accounts.

Secondly there are the dozen or so savings accounts for which the RBS account is the “nominated” account required by the savings account for electronic funds transfers. I have never changed or even used some of them since setup and reasonably I expect the other party to have strong security processes over changing the details – which will make change all the harder.

Thirdly there are all those third parties whose bills I now pay using direct transfer when on-line. With RBS they were setup slowly over time, but it was troublesome to get the correct destination account details which sometimes seemed to differ from the published accounts. With RBS there were additional foibles, such as new accounts added by the phone service not being usable by the on-line service. A new bank will have its own quirks to be learned through painful transaction failures.

Finally, there is the question of incoming physical payments. Some remote banks may have excellent customer service, but can you pay in cheques? Another quirk with my RBS is that there is no branch where I live and I normally paid in cheques through NatWest. When I received a large cheque from a solicitor they declined to accept it, insisting I must visit a branch of my own bank, which was most inconvenient. So something else to find out and build into the evaluation criteria.

Hence I am dreading the move and have so far done nothing about making it happen.

Unlike Martyn I was tempted by the interest rate and other attractions of a Santander account and decided to switch fully knowing the low satisfaction rating which your readers have given the bank. There have been times in the last three months (yes that’s how long it’s taken) when I have regretted it. My current account was with Citibank, not one that Which has reviewed as far as I am aware. They used to give good service but have been very slow at introducing ‘faster payments’ (they still haven’t) and also started charging for using the debit card abroad (£5 a time) when withdrawing cash. It was impossible to talk to anyone in this country as all calls were channelled through an Indian call centre and sound quality was always very poor. As a mortgage holder with santander I was entitled to their ‘zero’ account which offers no charges for using your card worldwide. It was also offering 5% interest for the first year.
When I contacted the bank at the end of July to set up the switch things started to go wrong on the second day when their ‘underwriters’ refused my present free overdraft of £500. No explanation was given despite the publicity saying that they will match the overdraft of your present bank. I challenged them about this and said I would appeal. I even obtained my credit rating for them which was 998 out of 1000! They asked for copies of bank statements and proof of my overdraft! This despite the fact that I pointed out (as it says on Citibank’s website) that all their customers receive this. The overdraft was finally approved in mid October!
Most of the problems arose over switching direct debits. They claimed that Citibank were not responding to their advances. As a result all my direct debits continued to be charged to an account that now had no money in it as I had done my bit and transferred my income to the new account. When I contacted Citibank they said that they had heard nothing from Santander. In this position of course you are helpless as it is one person’s word against another. This took two months to sort out. The main problem was the lack of communication between members of Santander’s switching team. Every time I phoned I talked to someone different and they seemed unable to call up the information from previous calls. They also managed to lose much of the first round of information that i sent to them through the post. It wasn’t until I lodged a complaint that I was assigned one person to sort everything out. To give Santander their due, things did at this point start to happen. They made a small ex-gratia payment in lieu of all my time and telephone calls and they fully re-imbursed all the penalty charges that I had received because of reversed direct debits.
This experience gives some insight into why people are so reluctant to switch bank accounts. It needs to get better.
The online experience with Santander is good. Their website has good security as far as I can tell and account details are very clearly presented and easy to manage.

HI by Martyn,
I too am a First Direct customer and I both concur and attest to the fact that their customer services are phenomenal. In there years of being a customer the few problems that I’ve had have been resolved swiftly, painlessly and with the professionalism I have come to expect from First Direct. That said I had no complaints with the 18 years I was with either Halifax or Natwest who both provided exceptional customer services.

That said for a bank that has no physical presences, First Direct’s website, usability and user experience on the site does lead a lot to be desired. There are a number of factors that the bank has not and persistently fails to address. If you check out their new labs pages http://www.lab.firstdirect.com/ (a good idea which is let down by it’s website design and lack of follow-up and comment on suggestions) you’ll see a myriad of requests for basic things like the ability to change account names, delete old payees, amend standing orders prior to the first payment etc. Other requests include Internet Bank Plus to support Apple (difficult because of the use of ActiveX), better internet banking for mobiles or banking App that works on handsets and devices other than Apple. There have been also been a number of requests to download First Direct branded Pdf statements (particularly useful when a person opts for a paperless account), tracking facilities similar to those offered by Lloyds, Love Money, Money Dashboard and the like and a better Labs site.

In brillant First Direct fashion, when I sent a 10 point email expressing my disappointment, I got a letter addressing each of the points in turn, in which First Direct explained unequivocally that it would not be introducing any changes requested for the website in the foreseeable future, or indeed any of the popular requested I’d inquired about and which were on the Labs.

So whilst I love First Direct, I think it’s main device for accessing the Bank i.e (it’s website), is languishing in the dark ages!!!