Letter To My Bank

Dear Sir or Madam (it was a Madam who replied the last time), 

This is a rather detailed and therefore lengthy letter so I would suggest a comfy chair and a cup of coffee. This is what I did yesterday morning when I sat down at 9am to apply for a limited offer fixed-rate deposit with my other bank. It was exciting. Just like Xmas had come early. Here they were, offering me 6% gross for 1 year when you only pay 3.8% gross.  For a person who relies on his savings to pay his pension, it was almost too good to be true. How prophetic! 

I started their on-line application process and was at the bit where I had to fill in my debit card details when I realized it would be prudent to move the amount of money I required from my e-saver to my current account. I signed onto the Abbey internet site and did a ‘move money’ transaction. At the last minute, after accepting everything I keyed in, I got an error message saying the ‘service was temporarily unavailable’. Now call me paranoid or what (paranoid isn’t really my name) but in these days of banks failing, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Abbey didn’t actually want people moving money around, even if it was cleared funds and all they were doing was moving it between accounts in the same bank! 

What fuelled my fears was that I’d had the same problem a few weeks previously when, before setting off to enjoy myself in Glasgow (I now live in France as you may have noticed from the letter headings) I’d tried to move the princely sum of £604.99 to my current account so that I could withdraw the money once I had hit the bright lights. After returning from a wet and wild weekend in my beloved home city, I had noticed that the ‘move money’ transaction had not happened and that my current account had gone ‘all red’.  I called good old Bangalore but got no joy so I called the Technical Help Desk and after a 20 minute call which cost me 20p a minute (0845 numbers are charged at a premium in France – how bizarre – eh ?) the girl kindly moved the money manually, said ‘there was a problem with the system’, it would be fixed and she agreed that I would not be charged interest for the inconvenience caused. 

Now I have to say that although I was only trying to move just over £600, this was at the time when major banks were failing faster than you could say ‘Fannie Mae’ and so my suspicions were aroused then. So how do you think I felt yesterday when, having been bombarded with messages for the last 6 weeks about the ‘financial strength’ of the Santander Group, who, having said their Tier 1 Capital Ratio (look it up) was quite robust thank you, they dived off into the market to raise the not inconsiderable sum of €7.2 billion! But hey, anyone who understands Tier 1 Capital Ratios doesn’t panic easily and so I got another cup of coffee and picked up the phone. 

Yup – you’ve got it. I got Bangalore again. I now feel that I know the city, I’ve spoken to them so many times recently. When people ask me where I’m going to travel to in my retirement, India doesn’t come into it. Been there, done that…albeit only on the phone. I ask them about the weather. Their families. What they’re having for lunch. I ask about that call centre agent who, when upset with the language of his customer, decided to get his own back by changing all the details on his accounts. Read on – is this what happened? Was this a case of Ranjiv’s revenge? 

Anyway, I digress. After only a 15 minute call this time (again at 20p a minute – I’m totting it up), Sanjiv decided to put me on hold. Nope. Line went dead! After calling poor old Sanjiv some names he wouldn’t recognize, I decided that I’d call the techies, the Sheffield accents are nice and I usually get through. After another 20 minutes, the girl agreed to move my money manually. There was still “a problem with the ‘move money’ system”! Great, all fixed – try to make a debit card payment to my new, super-duper high-interest account – transaction failed because of some problem. I call the techies again (10 minutes this time). This guy (I don’t take names – you never ever get back to that person anyway), said the problem was that I was trying to move too much money at once. There was a ‘floor limit’.  He couldn’t tell me what the limit was, but to try decreasing amounts until it worked. ‘Couldn’t he give me a clue’, I begged. ‘Couldn’t we play a little game until I guessed the number’. ‘Nope – not company policy’. 

I tried several transactions of decreasing values which all failed. I tried to pay a debit card transaction of 99p. Failed! This time, my new bank (very helpful by the way) gave me a message which said that the details on my card did not match the details I was giving them on the application form !!!!!! 

Called the techies again. Another guy, who seemed to know what he was doing, spent about 20 minutes looking at various things and decided that my name was Timothy, not Thomas. This was the problem. This is where déjà vu took over as I’d had the same problem last year when all my addresses and the names on my accounts changed, inexplicably, from Thomas to Timothy. Several dozen calls and a long letter later and you’d changed them back and kindly credited my account with £50. The guy said he’d change them all back again and that it would be sorted within minutes. I could finally get to open my super-duper, wizzo new account. Nope! After several attempts to make a direct debit payment the system still wasn’t working. It was now getting dark, I’d missed lunch and was feeling faint. That’s not all I was feeling. I imagined what hands round a neck feels like as you slowly strangle the life out of somebody – anybody! 

I call my new bank. It’s now too late to open my new super-duper pay-loads-of-dosh account so I collapse in tears. This is all too much for a pensioner who is known to be rather keen on controlling his finances to the nearest penny. I compose myself. Better get my money moved back into my 3.8% interest e-saver account. I sign on again. Go to ‘move money’ and do the transaction. Aaaaagh – ‘transaction failed – service temporarily unavailable’. I beat up the cat, kick the computer printer (it’s at my feet) and tell the kids on the phone they can walk the 5 miles home from school. To say I’m pissed off is a huge understatement. 

Another call to the techies (20 minutes). By now I’m crying. The girl is very sympathetic. Asks me to sit down and take some Valium and says I have been busy! She can see all the failed transactions. I plead with her just to return my money to my e-saver and I’ll go away. ‘Just some security questions’ she says very slowly. 

The final outcome is that she managed to move my money back to my e-saver. She even asked me to verify that it had happened by looking at my PC but it was sadly lying in bits on the floor by now. 

In summary, I spent approximately £20 on calls yesterday. Lost approximately £550 in interest by not being able to switch my money and probably lost several years off of my life expectancy. I will have a large vet’s bill for fixing the injuries to the cat and my PC will need repairing. My wife of only 6 months, is divorcing me and the kids have still not returned from school. Life is a bitch then you have to deal with The Abbey! 

Finally, I apologise for not having gone to the effort of getting the name of an actual Abbey person to write to, but having tried in the past, it would be quicker for me to research my family tree back to the 15^th century. 

Yours sincerely,