Recently, I received a letter from Lloyds TSB saying they had begun charging the charity a fee for its bank account. This seemed strange given we had a fee-free small charity account. So I phoned them up to find out what was going on.
Turns out, they hadn’t actually set it up as a charity account but had instead set it up as a regular business account. This meant they needed to transfer the account to a whole different area of the bank – something which is apparently quite complicated as when I phoned back to check two weeks later, the action which I was told I didn’t need to check up on because it would just be done, had not been done.
I gave it another few weeks and then I decided to log into my internet banking to see if I could see if it had been fixed. This is no small task because Lloyds TSB require you to use a card authentication system. But, because they don’t give debit cards out to small charities, they have to send you a special card, which isn’t a debit card, but which can be used in the card carder.
The card reader is massive btw, it’s not the kind of thing you can keep on your keyring, like you potentially could with the HSBC one, if you had seriously big pockets anyway, it’s not like theirs is tiny either.
So I arrived at the Lloyds TSB website and selected logon to business banking. First, I had to enter my user ID. This wasn’t easy because my user ID isn’t a memorable username as you would expect – it’s a string of nine random digits.
Luckily, they send you out a card to remember this. Though it isn’t a card with it printed on, it’s just a piece of cardboard with a white box that you can write it in yourself and hope that it doesn’t get rubbed off on the gloss finish.
I finally found my card and punched in my user ID. Step one was complete! Next I had to input the security code generated from the machine. So I dropped my authentication card into the authentication machine and typed in my PIN. It rejected it.
I tried again. It rejected it again.
So I clicked on the “I am having trouble logging in” link and it began asking me more questions about myself, for security purposes of courses. After four times of it telling me I didn’t exist, it finally let me through – only to tell me the only thing I could do was to phone the call centre.
I did phone the call centre and the nice woman at the other end of the phone said that she would have to get a new PIN sent out to me, and this would take a week to arrive (they can’t give it out over the phone to allow me to access my account now or anything). so I asked her to do that.
Next question, she needed two of the digits from my telephone banking password. I gave her those digits. She said they were incorrect. So now I can’t use telephone banking either apparently.
We eventually managed to bumble through, involving a shot in the dark guess about the year that I set up the account and a new PIN has now been dispatched to me in the post. As soon as I get that, I will be able to log into the account to check if they have changed it to the correct account type yet and refund the erroneous charge they put on the account. Wonderful.
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Tags: banking, internet banking, lloyds tsb, security
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 11:41 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.