Save the Cheque!

Inactive

BarclaysManager wrote: »

I have started to call these "Inactive roll eye moments."

I personally like to believe you copy them from the pages of the Daily Mail, choosing to completely ignore the fact that the average bank worker's salary is just £16,000 and the average "bonus" is £2000 a year and directly related to their own performance.

Stop it BM, you will have us all in tears very soon.

PS, I have started to call these the " BM defend the indefencible moments "..

BTW, you have never seen me quote any links to the Daily Mail.;)

Poor bankers.:rotfl:

Paulgonnabedebtfree

BarclaysManager wrote: »

That's actually what I was getting at.

Yes, of course. Without wanting to sound too snide, any real bank does - Abbey have just spiraled in the past few years with ever poorer IT systems. As an Abbey business user, I'm sure you'll remember the entire thing failing last year!

Also, there are plenty of places you can get business banking for free, it's not just an Abbey thing. Barclays, HSBC, etc. all offer it on similar terms to Abbey (no counter service, blah blah).

Thank you for your input.
This merits further investigation on my part.
When I originally started my business account with Abbey, I was attracted by the "free" label up to 100 cheques. This was mainly because, in view of what I do for a living (window cleaning), I seldom receive more than 100 cheques in a month and they are often of smallish amounts. Paying 50p or £1 for a cheque wouldn't be a problem if cheques were of highish amounts but I often get cheques for a tenner (sometimes less). Also, I have been doing my personal banking with Abbey (then Abbey National) for about 25 years. So they were the obvious choice.
The recent "upgrade" didn't adversely affect me. Access to the cashpoint was impossible for one Sunday so I couldn't deposit some cheques but fortunately, a one day delay wasn't critical in this instance. Unlike a lot of customers, I had little problem. Abbey's biggest failing in this from my perspective was in not warning in advance of exactly when the changes would occur.
The biggest irony was as follows:-
For a brief period (maybe a couple of weeks) those BACS reference numbers were made available to me in real time. Brilliant I thought. They are at last listening to my (and presumably other customers) nagging about this. I then went ahead and stapled letters to my bills offering a BACS payment facility to all customers. Luckily, few took me up on this as those reference numbers stopped appearing. This is even worse than never supplying them in the first place because when something changes, you gear your business up for that facility. To then remove that facility is gross negligence IMO.
Phoning the droids to complain and pass on complaints is of no use whatsoever. I'm shortly to draft a complaint letter to the head office so that my complaint can be ignored by someone more important . I don't want to change banks (it would mean re-issuing my bank details to my current BACS payers) so I'm prepared to give Abbey the opportunity to sort this out.

ahai1

If the banks started to charge I doubt they would have many customers left. Personally I think the balance is right as it should be business customers who are paying for the personal bank account.

To be fair to banks I don't understand how they can make much money on the average current account as they have to provide a debit card, paying book, cheque book, statements and a lot of other things like verifying security and internet banking.

Signatures can change as I learned to my cost when I had to go to the HSBC and verify it as there was no other way of transfering an ISA.

A lot of internet banking fraud is down to carelessness for example sharing information and going onto phising websites.

It is difficult to work out someone's security details if they are careful.

It seems to me that a lot of people are making assumptions about security without any facts. What you get in the news is the security breach that happens sometimes and it is in many cases the customers fault.

As for setting up an internet transfer with the authority from 2 people that seems reasonable to me.

rb10

Paulgonnabedebtfree wrote: »

I then went ahead and stapled letters to my bills offering a BACS payment facility to all customers. Luckily, few took me up on this

This is why cheques will live for a while yet. Whilst other, more efficient, methods do exist, most people are unwilling to change, and will prefer to write out a cheque.

ahai1

It could be that people don't want to change to something new and they are not used to internet banking.

Going back to a surcharge. Why would anyone go to a shop that did that on a debit card?