Posts Tagged ‘lloyds tsb’

Last week, we tried to get Elina’s bank account sorted out. When she originally set up the account with Lloyds TSB, they would only give her a cash card account, which is a weird account that has limited functionality, including not being able to use Link ATMs. They kept saying they could eventually change it, but they never have, despite nagging.

So we went into HSBC as I bank with them and have generally had less bad experiences than other banks. They weren’t too happy about doing it at 2:30pm on a Saturday, but eventually agreed to see us. However, they then moaned that we only had two months of bank statements, not three, and so couldn’t continue. So we stormed out of there.

Next we went to Lloyds TSB and once again asked them if they could upgrade the account. They said that their old system that isn’t 100% accurate said no, they couldn’t give her a real current account, but they couldn’t check for sure as their new system wasn’t working. They couldn’t give us a reason either – just “computer says no”, so we left there too.

The next bank along the street was Natwest who aim to be “Britain’s most Helpful Bank”. That is an admirable aim, but then, when you think about it, it’s really like being “Britain’s most gentle rapist” = admittedly more gentle than other rapists, but still ultimately a dick that abuses everyone who comes near it.

So we decided to skip that one and pop in to Nationwide, who are a building society.

They closed at the same time as HSBC, but were willing to set up the account anyway. Indeed, our account manager Shabana actually kept the branch open for us for an extra half an hour while we sorted everything out! She talked us through all their accounts and they immediately accepted Elina for a proper account.

I was so impressed, that I left with a new current account for myself as well! Of course, time will tell whether they continue to deliver on customer service, but so far it has been an incredibly refreshing experience.

I wasn’t going to write about this, but so many people have now mentioned it to me that I’ve decided it is worth while commenting after all…

It’s now been six months since Lloyds TSB started the processing of correcting the account they had incorrectly set up and then started billing our charity for. They’re still working on it. After all this time, you really have to wonder if they ever will get it done.

This is a bank of truly incompetent scale – no wonder they had to sell 77% of it to the government as part of a £37,000,000,000 bailout from public funds to the major banks. That’s about £800 each btw.

So what did such a bank do with all it’s ill-gotten gains from hard-working taxpayers?

They spent £40,000,000 sponsoring London 2012. As if the tax payer hadn’t paid enough for the Olympics already, Lloyds TSB are now taking our emergency bailout money and spending it on making itself a sponsor of London 2012!

Not only that, but this is only the money paid for the sponsorship deal – and one imagines that the expenses of having a party bus follow the Olympic torch around and anything else rack up to quite a bit. In fact, they’ve even made a website about everything their blowing money on this summer.

It’s absolutely unbelievable.

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.

I normally pay off all off the full balance of my credit cards via direct debit each month. However when it came to renewing my car insurance last summer I calculated, given the amount they charge you to pay monthly, it was actually cheaper to pay the whole lot upfront on my credit card and pay that off each month than it was to just pay my car insurance monthly.

As such I’ve had a rapidly diminishing but never the less outstanding balance on my Lloyds TSB credit card for the past couple of months.

Bare in mind that this is a credit card which I have held for over three years now and never have they written to me regarding it. Then today I was opening my mail and found a letter announcing that they had increased my credit limit. Actually, according to the letter, they have increased my “credit limit.”

And I know, I know, a corporation is by definition a soulless entity without feelings designed to grab as much money from people as possible by whatever means and I am normally the first to preach about how you can’t really judge such an entity for immortal practices because it is by it’s very nature amoral.

But seriously, we’ve just gone through a global financial meltdown. Indeed one which Lloyds TSB was actually bailed out by the government. And when I say by the government I mean by me, because the government is funded by the huge tax bill I pay every month.

Now I don’t particularly care that they have done this because I’m not going to go out and spend the extra money and struggle to pay it back, I have far higher limits on my other cards anyway. But there must be thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people out there who would go out and dig themselves into even more debt which they would struggle to pay back all because the banks saw another opportunity to take advantage.

Wankers.