Little win from Santander

danielwhitehouse

I wanted to share with you guys a little win I had yesterday.

A few weeks ago I opened a new current account with Santander because good old Nationwide sent me a letter saying that they were charging for overseas withdrawals now..

The process of actually setting up the account was quite straight forward and they transferred all my standing orders and direct debits over smoothly. Oh yeah, direct debits, hoe nice of them.

So everyone gets their salary paid into their account at the end of the month right? So why did they transfer all my direct debits over and then send mail me a form to transfer my salary across after?

In any case the direct debits bounced and there was £100s of pounds worth of charges on my account before I had even used it.

I spent the whole night on the phone repeating myself and trying to get through to the right department to make a complaint.

I might as well close the account and go somewhere else.

I managed to get the charges over turned but it took all night..

I have always wondered why banks are the only service providers that keep messing up on a regular basis, evetyone hates them and wait a sec, they went and caused a global recession, but we keep having to go back..

Very frustrated, but anyone looking to switch their account over to Santander for the free £100, which I'll probablyt never see, beware!

the_insider

Halifax offer a 'Switchers' overdraft to stop this exact thing from happening. You tell them the total of your direct debits, they give you an overdraft for that amount and you pay it off when you get paid. Simples. I'd recommend that you shop around in future, but congratulations on the success.

antrobus

So let's get this straight. You opened a new bank account, arranged to have a whole load of DDs and SOs paid out of that account, but neglected to pay any money into the account to cover the payments, so they were all rejected, and that's somebody else's fault? When presumably your previous month's salary was sitting untouched in the Nationwide account?

I realise of course, that all banks have been put in this earth purely in order to torment the living, but surely there must be some kind of limit as regards what sins can be placed at their door? I think it's very good of Santander to refund the charges in these circumstances.

P.S. You don't need a form to get your salary transfered. You just go to your payroll department and give them the details of your new bank account.

P.S.S. Oh I'm going to get into trouble for this!

EarthBoy

danielwhitehouse wrote: »

So everyone gets their salary paid into their account at the end of the month right?

Wrong. Companies can pay salaries on any date, not just the end of the month. I get paid on 15th and have been for many years. A friend's company pays him on 20th, while another friend gets paid on the last Thursday of every month, so his pay date is variable.

Wasteofspace

It is my understanding that if you use the Santander switching service to open the account then any fees incurred for these kind of issues should be waived. I think sadly it's just the case that the advisor's there aren't always clued up on the companies own policies. Apparently there is a lot of retraining going on so hopefully things will improve.

danielwhitehouse

Antrobus, you misunderstand me. What they were supposed to do was send me the form in good time to get my salary moved over as that is how they wanted me to do it. The point was they sent me the forms after the date they were supposed to so my salary was not able to be paid in in time. That's not my fault at all, it was theirs..