Consistent - Consistently bad, that is!

The company I founded have been banking with HSBC from the start, about 7 years ago. Throughout that period, I can hardly recall any single instance where they have provided even adequate service.

We are based at one of their main branches in the City of London, so one would assume that this would be one of their better teams.

The lack of knowledge of their staff about fairly mundane issues is astonishing. We are now experts on walking HSBC staff through their HSBC-internal systems on a wide range of topics, such as for example dealing with non-convertible currencies.

One running joke over the years has been the identity and whereabouts of our account manager. For some puzzling reason, they have never been actually based at our branch. Due to what seems like continuous restructuring, that person's identity has also changed a number of times. We are yet to meet any of them.

Another representative anecdote of their shortcomings occurred when we had a 'regular' review meeting (our only one so far). Some investment 'specialist' attended, and we agreed on a second meeting to discuss pension related options, on the strict and repeatedly expressed condition that they would send us the relevant material beforehand. Unsurprisingly, despite 2 email reminders, this never happened.

Their tagline 'The World's Local Bank' is sadly accurate. We originally chose HSBC partly because we believed that their global presence would make opening and operating accounts in other countries more efficient. In reality, their operations in different countries only seem to have their logo in common. Oh, and their inadequacy: in China, for instance, we have found them significantly less efficient than the local, state-controlled banks.

They are quite efficient at charging high fees for any service, so I guess they are a well-run business in that sense.

We have finally had enough and have decided to take our business elsewhere.