i have never had a cheque clear quicker than 7 days and the longest was 10!! when i have queried this all they say is that this happens!!!

Just opened a new business account with the Poole branch transferred from Barclays. Tried to pay in substantial amount of cash over the counter and They refused to take it despite there bring NO one else in the bank I.e. zero queue!. Was made to feel dirty and unworthy and told to pay it into a machine near the open front door in full view of passing pedestrians! No envelopes available. Dreadful. The worst piece of customer service I have ever encountered of ANY service industry in 40 years. No wonder Sander have the lowest customer satisfaction rating of any bank. Changed from Barclays to save on charges but wish I had stayed put now.

I make regular payments to my customers once a week using their "Multiple payments" section of the website. Its very clunky and difficult to use compounded by the fact that it keeps timing out and I lose all of the input data and have to start over. A few weeks ago, I made a large payment which crashed the site, I rang "help" and was told to try again, I did, It crashed a further two times. I gave up at that point. The next day i noticed the large payment had been debited out of my account 3 times and left almost no money in their. The hassle This caused was unbelievable. I eventually got them to put the money back but now have ZERO faith in the ability of this bank to manage my business accounts. STAY AWAY AT ALL COSTS

Since Santander took over from Alliance and Leicester, our small business banking needs have become ridiculously troublesome to manage, with non-existence service over the telephone and no in-branch support. Statements no longer received and unable to activate online statements as the system says I don't get paper statements (I know this...). Unable to pay suppliers now where telephone numbers are out of date and OTP code does not activate. No weekend telephone support and those answering the telephone unhelpful and unclear. Look elsewhere, even if your bank support needs are minimal. This is a joke.

Probably the worst decision of my entire life to use santander for business banking. They offer free banking as the main feature for new customers but as we signed up we quickly learnt you get absolutely no customer service, no in branch help, astronomical charges and a mickey mouse outfit on the end of the phone every time we called. Avoid!

I own a new start up business and have a business account with Santander for 7 months. We are profitable and most of our income is with BACS or cheques. Occasionally some of our customers pay by cash including coins. Today I had an awful experience at the Clapham Junction branch who refused, even after speaking with the manger, to pay in my coins. They said I had to pay in notes at the ATM and go to the Post Office to pay in £6 of coins !! I pointed out that the Harrow, Clapham Common, Brixton and City of London branches have all allowed me to pay in cash over the counter - usually after the ATM rejected notes which have writing on them. Their customer service at the retail branches is poor. SMEs like myself do not have time to be messed around like this. The ability of staff to use common sense is non existent. I will be changing my account. The prime minister to trying to help small busineses by reducing red tape yet Santander just does not get it

Alliance & Leicester had a really simple and efficient My Business Bank site. We got moved to Santander Corporate Banking's online "service". There are many examples of how not do implement a website and this is one of them. Say you want to search for a beneficiary that you're going to pay ... you'd better type in UPPERCASE otherwise it gives no results. Say you want to search for a payment that needs authorising ... First enter the type of payment Then start and end dates Then the amount range ... yes you have to do all of this before you stand a chance of getting a result from the search. The amount range has to be in a £10,000 range. Want to find 55,000 then you have to put in a range of 50,000 to 59,999 otherwise .. no results. The list goes on. And I'm changing my bank. halfwits, halfwits, halfwits.

It's been nearly two months since I applied for a business startup account and still nothing. Several requests for information which I respond to within 1 day and get nothing back for at least a week - the questions I have got back indicate that the staff do not know even the basics about business (and mine is incredibly simple!). I cannot invoice without a bank account for the funds to go into so this is seriously impacting my cashflows now....something Santander clearly don't care about. I certainly wouldn't trust them with my cash after this experience. Poor processes, lack of staff training and it feels like they are seriously understaffed.....it's just not worth it. Do not believe any of their advertising about how long it will take - my last email to them was over 2 weeks ago and still no response.

and it is really bad service. I had to change after a few months, long lines....

Santander closed our business account (without telling us) in May of this year. Apparently our business had been dissolved!!!!!!! News to us, it hadn't. After much legwork, sweat and tears they finally admitted it was a banking error and we received compensation. In mid October, without warning our debit cards from our business account were frozen. A few days later, without our knowledge our direct debits from the same account were stopped. The following day, again without our knowledge our cheque book was frozen. It appears once again, an ALMIGHTY BANKING ERROR, which they have now admitted. Today 19 days after this fiasco started, I phone to see when my new debit card was sent and guess what it hasn't. Nor have the transcripts we requested, of the various phone calls, been sent either. This bank is absolutely crucifying our business and you know what, they simply don't give a dam, otherwise they would have sorted it.

I have been locked out of my on line banking for four months. Every time santander state I have exceeded three wrong attempts. It now becomes apparent that if you use an iPad you are automatically locked out on entering new information. They do not state this in any of the literature they send out. On one occasion after three weeks I rang to see where the new codes were and they had 'forgotten' to send them. On another occasion when I wanted to transfer money the manager had to be called and then he was in a meeting so it could not be done. It's like banking with a group of six formers. If you choose this bank get ready for significant damage to be done to your business. Not only would I not recommend them I think they should come with a health warning. Atrocious.

Santander upgraded my account last week from alliance ones, no longer can add fields explaining movement between accounts, and to top it all we had three users previously, with different users having different access This has all gone in the same seamless upgrade that will not affect us in anyway, a hidden side affect is that no-one in the business had access to the accounts to pay WAGES and BILLS. ie we can see our money but cannot do anything with it. The support desk blames us, and have asked us to travel 200 miles to get various signatures from the directors, as we now need to ask permission to access our accounts again, this will take upto 10 days to fix according to their written response. How do I pay STAFF wages !!! and BILLS !!! grrrr their new website has all the wrong opening times for their telephone banking, but as their are robots that follow scripts, they will not listen. Managed to send some emails of the problems of the site to a personal bankign rep - who at least tried to help We now await to see if we can ever access our money

The old A&L website used by Santander was a really professional job. I had received warnings that the website was being re-branded BUT the new one imposed on me yesterday was not just re-branded it also had lost major elements of functionality that were invaluable to my small business. If I had been warned of that I could have taken steps to extract data in advance but as it is I have lost the ability to supply my accountant with a full credit/ debit list of all transactions for him to cross check against my real time records. What they have done is applied their personal banking website to businesses. I have a personal account with them and its fine for that but not for business. I like to see change and development from learning but this is a case of a bank rationalising its software at the expense of customer service. The cynic in me has noticed they charge new customers and maybe their intention is to drive away those who enjoy free banking by downgrading their service, in my book a down grade in service that costs nme money is an example of them changing me!

Things I liked: - Things I disliked: Regularly getting Bank statements that span into the next month (HTF does that work?) making the accounts even more challenging than they should be. The old terrible online account system has been updated today & has frozen me out along with many others, can they refresh my detail today, yes, but they will post them to me -no email option? No out of hours support for business customers, but if you are joe public its cool! Bank charges for being overdrawn for 2 hours within the same working day. PDF bank statements missing (dont worry sir we will send you a photocopy -how did they got the original?) Yes, counter service at the post office is helpful because there are many post offices, but this does mean you have to go to a post office -an experience to me usually worse than any dentist.

I was happy with Alliance and Leicester but now Santander have taken over and brought in a new website and charges it is just awful. They have removed basic functions like debit and credit lists and payee lists are now random rather than alphabetically ordered so you have to scroll up and down a massive list every time you wish to make a payment. Worse still, they have removed the authorisation process which essentially means you can no longer have an accounts administrator and poses a massive security issue for businesses who employ accounts administrators to do payrolls as in theory they can now run off with your money. Shockingly bad and looking into moving banks asap.