Abbey Banking Chaos.

I know that this isn’t entirely on subject, a but a blog is a good place to let off steam about customer service nightmares, particularly online ones.

We’ve discovered something pretty extraordinary about our business bank, an institution in the UK known as Abbey. Before you panic, this only applies to the business banking side, not, as far as I know, to the personal banking, but it’s quite extraordinary.

When you do payments online with Abbey National Business Banking you can think you are sending money to one person, when in fact you are sending it to an entirely different one. I still have to pinch myself to believe I wasn’t dreaming when the Abbey representative told me this, as if it was an ordinary everyday sort of thing about a bank. I was saying, “but this is outrageous, it’s basic banking, you’re creating chaos”, but nice though the Scottish lady on the end of the phone was, she didn’t really seem to “feel my pain”.

I was mystified why my payments were going astray. Fortunately, they were just going to another account owned by me - but they could have been going to somebody else entirely.

Apparently it’s like this. If you have two logins on your account - which most businesses do - and if you and your business partner both set up payment schedules 1, 2, 3, with nicknames, John, Jane, Jill, then Abbey’s online payment system gets completely confused. John might be 1 on your first login, and Jill might occupy that spot on your second login.. You send money to Jill, but really it goes to John. There’s no way to review the account details before you press “send”. You just see the nickname which you’ve set up. It’s scary.

As far as I know, this only applies to their online Business Banking facility. It’s been pulling in lots of customers because of its attractive interest rates, but Abbey’s been cutting staff and moving the location of their payment centre. Abbey has been bought by a Spanish Bank, Banco Santander, and it doesn’t want to spend any more money on IT until the New Year when it will be merging its system with Santander’s.

Anyway, I forgot to mention, all this applies to another small business which I own with my wife. Matthew and I at Blog Relations have been trying for months to open an account with Abbey. It’s been a long trail of delays and lost papers. We’ve both been far too British and patient about it. It’s no use having a good interest rate if your cheques are sitting in a drawer. Now we are taking our business eleswhere.

We in the UK expect banks to be bad, but there has to be a limit…..

This entry was posted on October 29th, 2005 and is filed under Best Practice, Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.