Tesco Personal Finance Internet Saver Review

Overall Rating

My wife and I started using Tescos as a savings bank because of the attractive rates last year.
We read the reviews and were unimpressed, though not put off, by people's experiences with the on-line service. We expected delays and we were not disappointed. It took weeks and weeks to get hold of a keypad so we could use the card, and in the end, after many calls, the Tesco operator said we could use any other banks' keypad! So we used the NatWest one to set up a payment in order to be able to get money back to our main bank if we wanted it.

Right from the word go, their site was clunky and sometimes displayed incorrect messages such as "You only have one password attempt left" even though it was the first try, but it still led us to enter all sort of security information yet again. Despite all this, and, much to my surprise at my own tenacity, we went ahead and both opened up accounts.

Then came the time that we really needed to get the money out and of course, it's only £10k at a time. Not their fault, we just forgot - and it is the same with Sainsburys.

Logging on was a real pain with conflicting messages which eventually led us to the main account page, showing the balance. However, we could not get past this. The support people were as helpful and friendly as they could be but they did try and suggest it was our computer. We tried another computer and reset the modem - we also tried two other browsers. All to no avail, except now, unexpectedly, it lost our regsitration which meant we would have to re-register - and we really needed the money quite quickly.
At the same time, we were able to log onto other banks and move money around so the problem was certainly not our end.

To their credit, they were brilliant the following day (a Saturday) and sent us by courier the entire balance. For that, we cannot thank them enough and I can't help feeling that the Tescos staff are as fed up with the service as their customers are.

At the end of the day though, we could not continue with an on-line banking service which was so unreliable, and I believe it is because of the link between Tescos and the RBS who manage their banking. It's that "hand-off" to the RBS computers that seemed to be the hold up, but I am guessing a bit there.

In conclusion, I could not recomend anyone to use their on-line banking and, since they are moving into full service banking, I would expect them to carry out a major review of their on-line service before they started marketing it. If they don't, then they are going to have a problem. For the time being then, I'd say stay away.