{"id":438,"date":"2009-09-03T12:36:38","date_gmt":"2009-09-03T08:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=438"},"modified":"2009-09-10T12:37:14","modified_gmt":"2009-09-10T08:37:14","slug":"barclays-idiocy-part-187","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/438\/","title":{"rendered":"Barclays Idiocy, Part 187"},"content":{"rendered":"

Finally, after 3 years of trying, I am getting shot of Barclays bank who for the past 13 years have handled all my banking matters.\u00a0 When I was in the UK they were fine, but when I transferred to their international banking in 2003, they have been nothing but useless since.\u00a0 I wrote a post<\/a> in April 2007 describing their shortcomings and the period since has seen a continuation of much the same sort of stuff.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For example, when I was in Thailand in June I found my card had been blocked, despite my calling them to put a holiday marker on the account (this happens all the time).\u00a0 When I called up what passes for customer services, they told me the card had been cancelled and a new one issued, supposedly on my request (which was nonsense).\u00a0 Naturally, the new card hadn’t been sent to me due to Barclays not wishing to pay for a courier and instead preferring to hide behind unfounded security concerns as soon as the word “Russia” is heard.\u00a0 So I was left drawing out cash on a credit card until I returned home, whereupon I was told that the woman on the phone had misinformed me and the card wasn’t cancelled and that it should now work (it did), which was 4 weeks before Barclays called and confirmed it had been cancelled due to a banking error.\u00a0 Barclays would save time and money by informing their customers only when they haven’t<\/em> made an error of some sort.<\/p>\n

So it now looks as though I am transferring to RBS, the main reason being that they have a branch in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk following their takeover of ABN-Amro.\u00a0 I am a little suspicious of how much help this will be, especially when my experience of HSBC in Dubai cooperating with HSBC in the UK was less than impressive (oh, they’re nothing to do with us!), and every time I’ve gone into the local RBS branch here I’ve been greeted by a row of blank faces saying “ya ne znayu<\/em>“, but I know the branch manager and he’s helped me out in the past, so I’m hoping it will be an improvement on Barclays.\u00a0 It can’t be much worse.\u00a0 So far, RBS say they can send cards to my address in Russia, which has always been the biggest problem (with HSBC too, I believe).\u00a0 I’ll wait to see if this is true, but at the very least they should be able to send them to the branch.\u00a0 Can’t they?<\/p>\n

Anyway, to open an RBS offshore account I need to show them\u00a0the last 6 months statements from my current account.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Barclays typically cocked up my changing of address and have been sending all the statements for my GBP account to an old address; the statements for the USD account, which in theory shares the same address as the GBP account, have been reaching me fine.\u00a0 RBS accept online printed records, but for some reason which indicates a level of uselessness impressive even for Barclays, their online banking system can only display the last 6 weeks of records.\u00a0 That’s right, Barclays online banking cannot show you what happened in your account 2 months before.\u00a0 So I rang up and asked them to send me the last 6 months statements.\u00a0 Of course, this was not possible: according to Barclays it is illegal (which I doubt).\u00a0 In fact, nothing is possible in Barclays, I don’t know why I bothered ringing them up in the first place.\u00a0 Their motto should be “Sorry, we can’t do that!<\/em>”<\/p>\n

I was advised to go and visit a local branch and ask them to call an Isle of Man number so they can then fax my statements across.\u00a0 Fortunately, I am in London for a couple of weeks, one of the main reasons being that I can finally change my bank having failed to do so from Sakhalin (this current experience is demonstrating as to why).\u00a0 I asked the woman on the phone if she could contact the Aldgate branch of Barclays and fax them across and I could go and collect them.\u00a0 Apparently she couldn’t, because the UK branches were “nothing to do with them” (perhaps she’s ex-HSBC!) and they have awful trouble getting through to them.\u00a0 Ah, much better to let the customer negotiate such obstacles!<\/p>\n

So I wandered down to the Aldgate branch and handed a youth in a turquoise tie the number he needed to call, which he did.\u00a0 20 minutes later, he is still waiting to be connected.\u00a0 It seems Barclays’ internal system is as crap as their external customer service desk.\u00a0 Eventually somebody answered and after another 10 minutes, something arrived on the copier\/fax machine across the room: 10 blank sheets of paper.\u00a0 The\u00a0blithering idiot\u00a0on the Isle of Man had put them in the feeder the wrong way up.\u00a0 There was nothing for it but for Turqouise Tie to call again, which meant another 20 minute wait for somebody to answer.\u00a0 I asked him why he didn’t call her direct line, and he told me she doesn’t have one, and nor does anybody but the most senior people.\u00a0 And he couldn’t email her because nobody has an email either, even branch managers.\u00a0 That’s right: Barclays<\/em> branch managers don’t have an email address!\u00a0 <\/em>No wonder they are so utterly useless at responding to and solving customer issues, they spend all day on the phone listening to tinny music waiting for somebody to pick up.\u00a0 No wonder Barclays refuse to email me scanned copies of my statements, the clowns don’t have an email account to do so!\u00a0 Eventually something with writing on came to the copier\/fax: 10 poor quality sheets indicating in an appalling format my transactions over the past 6 months.\u00a0 No, wait: from January ’09 to July ’09.\u00a0 The woman who cannot load paper into a fax machine also cannot understand the meaning of “the last 6 months”.<\/p>\n

And these idiots want to manage my financial affairs.\u00a0 Let’s hope RBS is even marginally better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finally, after 3 years of trying, I am getting shot of Barclays bank who for the past 13 years have handled all my banking matters.\u00a0 When I was in the UK they were fine, but when I transferred to their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}