Report Abuse

“HSBC gave me a student account with an overdraft....”

Written on: 26/08/2009

HSBC gave me a student account with an overdraft. Because my student loan and part-time job wages apparently did not sit intact in the account long enough (it's a current account, not a savings account, for goodness sake), I ran into difficulties.



They refused the much-advertised overdraft extension after the first year because of my "poor record". When I asked the HSBC employee for advice on how to improve my "record", she said the reasons for someone having a poor record are confidential and even she could not know them! It was a preposterous mystery that I could be told that I was a "poor" customer but that advice on how to rectify this was classified! ALSO, if a student had a glowing "record" (by paying in their lottery jackpot win, I can only imagine), they would not NEED the overdraft extension. So HSBC attract customers by advertising this but it is, in fact, a fiction.



HSBC then did the very un-chivalrous thing and demanded instant repayment of my overdraft. Obviously, being a student, I was in no position to do this. HSBC passed my account to a foreign debt-collection agency, who threatened me with bailiffs and court proceedings. All this because I was, as a student, unable to pay as much and as often into my student account as HSBC would have liked.



I have only just cleared my debt with this debt-collection agency and will never, ever, EVER bank with HSBC again. They were underhand and belligerent, and they fall far short of the promises made in their ads.