Dont Apply To A And L Yet!

christineedge

After having a lot of unnecessary and unfair charges from HSBC, my partner and I decided to switch to A&L under recommendation from this site. It seemed almost too good to be true and it was... We were told our overdrafts would be matched if we allowed them to do our direct debit/standing order switching. I found out today, after spending an hour on the phone to the Liverpool call centre, that in fact they can't match my overdraft BECAUSE the A&L branch didn't fax our bank statements over to head office. In addition, I was also told that they would NOT match my overdraft unless I could show that I've been in credit with my HSBC account for 2 days or more in the last 3 months. (No one had previously told me this?!?!) As it's a graduate account I have not been in credit for 4 years and the whole point of switching to A&L was for the interest free overdraft.
The overdraft matching criteria is fair enough but we were not informed of it as the branch were too busy trying to sell us loans and life insurance and trying to get us to remortgage whilst opening the current accounts for us. I'm not very impressed.