Mike's Flying

Ok, so we all know the lovely bank and provider of finantial services. Member of the RBS Group. My bank for over 7 years now.

On monday, they lost my bank account. It just pure plain dissapeared. Sure, I’d been sketchy with a loan payment, but I’d agreed methods by which to pay it back – and recieved assurances that I was in good standing.

It took me to call their online help team (suspecting an online banking glitch), and for them to tell me to go into a branch, for the branch to tell me that they couldn’t deal with it and I needed to call the collections department to discover that the arrangments I’d made hadn’t been entered into the system properly and that’s why my account had run off.

Well great. All fixed.

But wait, I’ve just spent two days without access to my money. Nothing, My card was declined everywhere. Lucky I had food and a generous flatmate really. Lucky I wasn’t stuck somewhere needing petrol or a place to stay.

Luck. Luck isn’t a good money word. Words like Sure, Safe, Guaranteed, They’re good words. Luck isn’t a good word when you’re relying on this money to live.

What follows is my letter to NatWest in complaint.

Enjoy.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I’ve been banking with NatWest for 7 years.

I’ve a loan and two accounts with you, and I even pay £12 a month for an Advantage Gold account.

I hope, that by some definition this might qualify me, if even only in part, as a ‘customer’.

I’d like to clarify how I see our relationship. Firstly, a bank account is a life – pay goes in and (usually fairly promptly) comes back out again in bills, payments, debits and heaven forbid, even food. The bank gets access to the cash deposited and usually provides other financial services for its customers. The customer gets somewhere convenient to store their earnings and point their bills towards. If they’re like me, they also take advantage of the overdraft and loan facilities on offer.

Now, how much does a person rely on a bank account?

Well, I can tell you how much, pretty accurately, because on Monday 07^th June 2010 mine vanished.

I’ll tell you the story in full momentarily, but considering I actually pay monthly for this account I’d like to draw a parallel or two.

Imagine waking up one day. Where do you wake up? Well on the floor, because the bed you paid for has disappeared. You brush your teeth at the sink but you have to use garlic butter and sugar because your toothpaste you paid for had disappeared. Why garlic butter? Well, your normal butter, that you paid for, has (guess what) disappeared! Now you want to get to work, but your car won’t start, I can’t say for certain but I’d hazard a guess that the petrol you paid for has disappeared. So you walk to work. You arrive sweaty, with bad garlic breath and late. Your day is ruined. That cute temp down the corridor you’ve been flirting with nearly throws up when you wave hello. You’re only wearing one shoe.

I mean, that’s a pretty bad day. By all accounts, I’d imagine you’d be pretty stressed if your day went like that. So, imagine how I felt when the bank account I’d paid for had disappeared. I wanted pizza at the time. No pizza. I wanted to put fuel in my car. No Fuel. I wanted to see how much available cash I had, oh wait! No account.

I was dumbstruck. Sure, if I’d done something wrong I would expect my account to have a black mark against it, maybe I’d even have received a letter or phone-call. Outright deletion seemed a little much as a first-response. I’d have felt like a gnat being squashed under the metaphorical sledgehammer of your accounts system. Well, I would have, if I’d done anything wrong.

So, the story in full:

Having missed a loan payment, your lovely collections department called me – this must have been 2 weeks previously – and we had a very useful and thorough examination of my current (appalling) financial situation. We arranged a payment plan to cover the arrears and I even paid £60 (all I could afford at the time) as a good-will payment. It was very helpful and constructive and I was extremely grateful for the progressive attitude.

Though apparently this plan, despite being recorded and agreed, wasn’t entered into the ‘system’ properly and hence, seemingly at random, the ‘system’ decides to lock and hide my account. No letter, no email, no text, no phone-call and no note on the online system. I’d have been happy to have received some word about what was happening, be it even by trained carrier-ferret or interpretative dance – some small effort to tell me about the impending cataclysm stalking my account.

It fell to me – having had my card declined – to log onto my online banking, discover my account had disappeared, call the website support team, get told to go into my branch, go into my branch, speak to a cashier, get told to speak to customer services, speak to customer services, get told I need to speak to an advisor, get told the advisors can’t deal with my case (at this point I’ve still no idea why this is happening), get given a number to call, call said number and lo! I’m talking to your collections department again.

Two days. Two days with no access to money. Two days with no word from NatWest.

I now have access to my account, but being without access to my account was a huge inconvenience – and having no warning, having taken specific steps to avoid the above predicament. I’m questioning whether I want to even continue banking with NatWest at all.

Thus, all joking aside, I want to know what you intend to do to keep my custom with NatWest, how you intend to reassure me that NatWest are capable of being such a central part of my day-to-day life and how you intend to stop this from occurring again.

Yours Faithfully

Mike

I’ll keep you all updated on my little saga as it unfolds.