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★☆☆☆☆

“UNhelpful banking!”

written by FurnitureRestorer on 25/11/2013

Woke up this morning to find my account had been 'rendered inoperable' due to me not returning the Customer Information form! One of my suppliers had had a cheque bounced, despite there being plenty of money in the account. Now I have to pay for the bounced cheque! I see RBS is under investigation for their handling of small business accounts (cf. The Times and Radio 2 this morning) and Nat West is part of their group.
During my 8 years of having the business account with NatWest, they have been SO inefficient that they have failed to take my previous partner's name off the chequebooks, despite me having a meeting with them in 2007 to tell them he had moved on. I even got told a couple of years ago that I was NOT the signatory on the account! To which I simply asked the girl why they had been honouring my cheques with my signature for the past 6 years?!! I wrote a formal letter of complaint to their Complaints department in line with their published procedure. I got a letter back saying they were sorry but nothing happened and the former partner's name is still on the chequebooks. When I asked them to send me an application form for telephone banking the girl told me that she couldn't send it to the business address because that wasn't the one she had on file! I asked her why the bank had been sending all my statements (much more private than a blank application form)to the business address in that case? I can never get hold of my so-called Business Account Manager. I left a message on her mobile in January 2012 and she has never yet called me back!
Now I am trying to close the account and move the money somewhere else I am told that I have to write to the bank to ask to close the account and that there may be restrictions on moving such a lot of money out of the bank! Whose money is it?
In my experience, this service is shocking to the point of being illegal, and nobody should go near it. Maybe if they redistributed the huge amounts of money spent on TV campaigns and national newspaper advertising into making a phone call to business customers to verify their customer information once a year...? Or maybe this is too logical. After all, why look after your existing customers who are already paying charges when you can spend hundreds of thousands of pounds having lunch with the advertising teams and going after new customers who don't pay any charges? I note they are high up in the top 10 business accounts listed on the main market comparison sites.

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