A & L migration to Santander

corky40

I recently married and have been trying to change my name and signature on my businees account. Still no joy after 8 weeks at my local A&L branch.
It took the Halifax 15 minutes to make the changes for a joint current account, two savings account, my insurance, a loan and my mortgage. Barclays took 10 minutes to change details on a current account.
Why are Santander so inept?

Dominic_

pocketrocket1 wrote: »

I have several standing order payments paid into my A&L account they have always had a name as a reference. Now since the change over they all come up with faster payment and no names have not a clue who they are from. On phoning the call center several times i am told that it is the "other bank we have no control over references" I have contacted to some of the payers but no one has changed anything and they are different banks!!!!!!

It has to be the new santander system but they can not tell me when if ever it will be sorter so much for "we will transfer over and you will not notice anything".

I know exactly what you mean! I send money to myself from another bank account, and the "payment reference" (as in, the name of the payment) and the "name" (as in, who it was paid by) were swapped round. It's clearly a programming error on the website... Santander's website.

lifebegins

Last week I called Santander to find out what exchange rate (pound : dollar) I would be charged on the Santander zero card when paying a hotel bill overseas in US dollars (I wanted to make sure I would not go over my limit). The call centre person had to go and check and came back with the answer "18.75%"! After several attempts to explain I she gave up trying to understand and passed me to another department.

This time he at least understood my question but had to google the Bank of England exchange rate as he informed me there is nothing in their systems to give them access to the current Snatander exchange rate used. I will be surprised if my bill actually reflects the number I was given.

I find it hard to understand how this company has expanded so rapidly when staff training seems inadequate (as staff working with financial products do not understand the difference between interest rate and exchange rate) and their systems do not give staff access to information needed to advise customers accurately.

bungalow_bill

Oh well, I thought the nightmare was over and I was all done with A&L having clicked the 'move my account' button on my existing Nationwide account.

I now have had a letter from N'wide saying that unfortunatley the account transfer is not proving straight forward as Santander are not using the electronic transfers at the moment due to their change of sort code. Which means I have to fill in forms etc and do it the paper way. The letter also says that Santander could supply me with a lsit of regular payments, but the thought of joining that customer non-service queue again only to waste my money listening to maddening music is to horrific to contemplate.

I will bide my time and add it to the long complaint letter that is waiting to be posted:mad:

jen245

Its not Santander that set the exchange rate, its the card issuer ie. Visa/Mastercard, so if you want to know what the exchange rate will be on a given day, check the relevant website for your card issuer.

Paulgonnabedebtfree

pocketrocket1 wrote: »

I have several standing order payments paid into my A&L account they have always had a name as a reference. Now since the change over they all come up with faster payment and no names have not a clue who they are from. On phoning the call center several times i am told that it is the "other bank we have no control over references" I have contacted to some of the payers but no one has changed anything and they are different banks!!!!!!

It has to be the new santander system but they can not tell me when if ever it will be sorter so much for "we will transfer over and you will not notice anything"

I am voting with my feet !!!!!

It's not the other bank at all. It is Santander who fail to display the references. Currently, Santander are losing about £500 a month of my business turnover which is paid by BACS. I have the customers pay it into my Co-op account. It's funny how every transaction received by the Co-op account displays the references. Therefore, it must be Santander screwing up.

donna_dynamo

I never had a problem with a and l but since the transfer i have been unable to access my savings account for two weeks +. i am really fed up when you e-mail them you get the guff that it is taking time to sort out problems with a non specific time scale. how helpful do they think it is i might only have £350 in it but this is emergency money for me and in an emergency i would not be able to get at it. the other two accounts i have got moved over fine. they are absolutely useless they knew about the takeover ages ago and are now whining about problems
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

traceyr

I tried phoning up the telephone banking service last night I was holding for 1 hour 12 minutes and still never got through. Santander are appaulling and I wish I had never transferred to them.

chopper602

Dominic_ wrote: »

I've not had time to read this whole thread, so forgive me if this has been asked before.

Has anyone successfully opened a Santander account after applying online? I applied for an ISA back in March, and after hearing nothing for three weeks, I had to go into the branch and ask why my application hadn't been processed, and apparently there was no record of my application on the system. Needless to say I was rather disappointed, as I'd have gone into the branch in the first place had I known that applying online would have been a waste of time.

I decided to apply for a savings account this week, and again, I did so online. It's only been two days, but I'd like to know if anyone else has had trouble opening any kind of account when they've applied online. If I can avoid waiting for another three weeks before finding out that I have to ring them up or visit them in-branch, I'd rather do that, and just ring them up now.

Took over three months for an on-line 'Santander Zero' credit card application to get finalised (then there were lots of c0ck up by Santander en route!).

1018hats

I applied for a Santander credit card because of the low fees for transactions abroad, several weeks before I was due to go away on two trips. Of the nine phone calls I had to make to chase it up, several of them were eventually connected (by their automatic system) to MBNA, with whom they apparently once had an arrangement, two or three years ago, but they had forgotten to take the connection out of their telephone system.

No matter what you did, their system wouldn't put you through to an operator unless you entered your credit card number, which was impossible for me as I hadn't yet received it! Eventually I rang their Head Office, and finally received my card two weeks after my trips abroad.

I then tried to set up online credit card banking, was given an ID number, and was told a password would be sent by post. It never arrived. After three weeks I chased it up, and two weeks later, it still hasn't arrived. In addition, I set up a direct debit from my Alliance & Leicester a/c, but when they merged with Santander the direct debit didn't get taken out, and they tried to fine me £12 for late payment. When I rang to make the payment by phone, they tried to include the £12 fine in my payment, despite having admitted earlier in the same conversation that the error had been theirs.

I have been a Customer Service Manager for a multi-million pound business for over twenty years, and if I or any of my staff gave service like this, we would be in serious trouble with the CEO. The word that best describes their service is "execrable".