Lloyds TSB refusing to deal with you

maggie2min

Hi ,
I have had a LLoyds current account for well over 5-7 years and have been using the account for my day to day bills/transactions and following Martin's savings tips to drip feed into other regular savings.
However I received a letter on the 17/12/08 saying that they had done a central review and could no longer run my account and to make other payment arrangements as the account would be closed 14/ 01 / 09.
Tried calling them and was told you can only write to them as they do not take calls.
I am quite shocked that they can do this to a long standing customer for no valid reason at all apart from the fact I guess they do not make much money off me.
Has anyone else had this please and any suggestions. I am quite cross and did not want to write as I am not sure they will do anything.

jonesMUFCforever

They must think you are up to no good - I can't say whether this is true or not but IMO is the only reason why they would do this.
Branches don't get involved in this (or telephone banking for that matter) as any reason will not be documented on their records because if you made a data access request they would be guilty of tipping you off!

Have you let anybody pay money through your account at all or had unreasonable sums of money go through it?

I have to say that once the bank has made its decision only if you can prove they are wrong will they change their minds.

Extant

Yes. It's REALLY because they're not making enough money of you.

First off, current accounts are typically a loss leader, and break even if you're really lucky. Second, that idea ignores the scores of empty, dead, dormant accounts etc. that all of the major high street banks have.

jonesMUFCforever

Sorry Barclays Manager but I have never heard of a bank closing an account which is not dormant or is overdrawn - being closed just because they don't make enough money out of you.

ShelfStacker_3

I think BM was being sarcastic.

Dead on about them being a loss leader. I've been quoted a price of about £60 just to supply a single debit card - just the card...

Extant

jonesMUFCforever wrote: »

Sorry Barclays Manager but I have never heard of a bank closing an account which is not dormant or is overdrawn - being closed just because they don't make enough money out of you.

What ShelfStacker said.

Extant

ShelfStacker wrote: »

I think BM was being sarcastic.

Dead on about them being a loss leader. I've been quoted a price of about £60 just to supply a single debit card - just the card...

It's not quite that expensive - the "blanks" are the most expensive part, even in bulk buy - about £4 each. I do have a break down somewhere of costs, I'll see if I can't fish it out for some proper detail. Gotta assume it'll be roughly the same for every bank, since we all use the same printers and such anyway...

I can tell you that a business cheque book from Barclays (60 cheques) costs 14p a cheque, or £8.40 a book. Not exactly cheap!

Mike1989

Suppose the expense in the card is purely from the chip part of it. But I can tell you now that I have had an account with RBS since about year 8 in high school, never put any money in it, never used it, never been in an RBS branch in my life, and it is still open and they still send me statements saying balance - nil. I did tell them to close it in a letter, obviously it never got there or they didn't do it.

But my account has had no action since it was open and its still there. No idea why they don't close it, its about 7 years old near enough now...lol

Extant

Mike1989 wrote: »

But my account has had no action since it was open and its still there. No idea why they don't close it, its about 7 years old near enough now...lol

There's probably a few reasons for that. First is, you don't account for these things per account. So you don't work it out that Mr X's statement costs you 8p to print and 27p to post every month - it's on a larger scale, so it's "statement printing this month cost us £34,000." As such, you would never think "should we spend this on Mr X's statement?" so your account would never be addressed in that light.

Second is the difficulty in shutting down inactive accounts and such. Some of them you can mark as dormant, for some it's not worth the trouble. It's just not worth the cost of paying someone to review these accounts, send out letters, etc.

maggie2min

thank you all who have replied, I have decided I will switch over to Barclays

jonesMUFCforever

maggie2min wrote: »

thank you all who have replied, I have decided I will switch over to Barclays

Interesting that you did not answer any of the points raised?