Alliance & Leicester (merged)

stevekranz

badboybob wrote: »

I'm in a similar position. My account was in credit - barely! - but they slapped on a £5 underfunding charge which pushed me overdrawn.

As I had no cash in the account I didn't bother checking it. Unfortunately I have received a letter saying I am £230~ in the red as a result! What gets me most is that if they had sent an email saying "we're gonna charge you £5 if you don't fund your account" I would happily have obliged. Instead they didn't even send an email when the £5 charge made me overdrawn.

Their reasoning, "It's an internet account, Sir, it is up to you to manage your money." .

I'm in similar position too

got told last week that i owe £697

this is due to me moving house and underfunding the account which then went overdrawn and being charged at £5 pd. Similar to someone else i tried to give them my new address but didn't have enough documentation and so did'nrt go back for a cpl of months.

I got made redundant and so tried to close account, took my savings money and closed that account, the girl in branch said that I could just leave premier account and come back to it at a later date.

It had a £300 overdraft facility on it, i withdrew upto 297
they didn't tell me of any underfunding charge or of £5 per day costs for going over it or else i would have paid in full and closed.

it is so wrong that they can do this..then when you ring their debt dept they shout at you!! £400 excess in charges am not happy.

but have set up repayment plan today at £20 per month and hopefully in a years time they should have something sorted and i won't have to pay the charges.

severe lack of communication NO EMAILS, for an internet account, no letters, no statements (I asked and they said they sent none) so they just went ahead and charged!

SCUM

carled

What is it with the A&L? They try and portray this "we're so friendly" public image, yet as soon as you contact them with a legitimate complaint, their rottweiler call centre staff treat you like something smelly they've stepped in!

I hold two identical current accounts with A&L. One is used for day to day banking and the other is used for group holiday trips I arrange. Early last year I went online to refund some money out of account A to a person who had been on a group holiday with me. I needed to transfer about £400 and only had £310 in there, so I arranged the transfer from that account and in the same session, transferred £100 to account A from my A&L account B, also in my online banking area.

Guess what? Oh yeah... A&L managed to take out the £400 overnight that night, but didn't apply the credit in from the other account I hold with them (same account name, same branch, same type, cleared funds, electronic transfer) until some time the next day. Of course they hit me with a charge (without telling me at this point) of £25, thus taking the account, which should have been £10 in credit by this point, overdrawn by £15. They then, a couple of days later, charged me another £25 for going overdrawn again and wrote to me.

"You're having a laugh," I thought and called them up, good naturedly, telling them that it looked like they'd made a simple mistake and surely they could see this was daft as I'd transferred money over to cover the transfer out, etc... Well, you'd have thought I'd rung up and threatened to roger the woman with a frozen ferret, the way she reacted. Straight up on her high horse, telling me I should read the t's and c's, etc... Yeah, yeah, I said, but surely as customer service, you can see that in this case it's daft, the money was there, it was coming in from your other account, etc...

Anyway, she wouldn't shift, she ended up putting the phone down on me and I had to call back to get her name so I could complain. I wrote in, telling them there appeared to be a mistake and that I disputed the charges and this was silly and please could they stop it before it all got out of hand and so on.

got back the form letter about bank charges, had to write again, by which time another £25 went on, complained about that, saying that I was disputing the debt and would they please stop adding charge after charge on whilst I was disputing it.

got back another form letter a week or so later, and a letter telling me another charge had been applied. I then contacted the FOS to complain that the A&L were totally ignoring me and they said that as it wasn't a standard bank charge case, they'd look at it, but they were a bit busy.

A&L continued to add charges, I continued to write to them telling them the FOS were looking into it and could they please pack it in, they continued to write, etc... By December, they had got up to £397 of charges... awesome, huh? At this point they simply froze the account. At least no more charges.

anyhow, it took until this flipping August for the FOS to actually look at the complaint. what did they do? They said that A&L were perfectly right to do what they did as, buried in the t's anc c's it mentioned that it took up to a day for even internal transfers between accounts to be credited.... would you believe it...

I wrote back explaining that the FOS were basically a joke if that was their best response and that, regardless of anythign else, surely as soon as I started disputing the charge with the A&L they should have frozen the action.

The FOS managed to completely ignore that question when they replied but said they had "good news" as the A&L as a good will gesture were prepared to knock £100 off the £397... well, as you can imagine, I told them to stick their offer where the sun doesn't shine, as creating a £397 debt when being told that the initial charge was in dispute, is hardly best practise for a bank now, is it?

I wrote back AGAIN to the FOS pointing out the OFT guidelines. The Ombudsman just emailed saying they wanted me to call to discuss. I told them to bog off as I wanted a written record, even if via email, of all their opinions on this.

Apparently the FOS don't have the power to tell a bank to improve it's level of service - I have that in black and white from the FOS... amazing. They aren't regulators and they don't have the power to award punitive damages. The OS say that basically they cannot see that the bank breached any duty it owed to me and therefore they cannot uphold my complaint...

Just in case anyone is online who knows the facts here, am I being mad, or is it really wrong that the A&L should be able to do what they did to me here?

MarkyMarkD

Cor, there are a few points to deal with in these posts. I don't expect people to like what I'm saying but I am just trying to answer the queries with a slightly more balanced response than some of the posts on here.

badboybob The requirement to fund the account with £500 a month (used to be £1,000 on some accounts but now all are £500) is clearly stated when you open the account. I don't see why A&L need to remind you of something you agreed to up front. All bank share prices have fallen through the floor due to the credit crunch; it isn't as you suggest anything to do with A&L's current account business practices.

pr0berts What exactly are you complaining about? The £5 a day unauthorised overdraft which you should have known about? Or the fact that you got charged for going overdrawn? The only reason your charges got significant was because you didn't bother checking your account balance for "a few weeks".

maintenanceman If you have an account which charges an under-funding fee if you don't use it (as you are already aware) then not checking the account or using it doesn't make any sense. If you don't want the account, close it. End of problem. All banks charge interest on overdrafts, or fees for unauthorised overdrafts, even if it is fees which caused the overdraft to continue or increase. That's not specific to A&L. Unauthorised overdraft fees are also notified at least 10 days before they are charged to the account, so aren't a surprise to anyone who actually bothers to check their account.

steve0793 Whilst A&L are not a party to the test case, they will be bound by its conclusions and hence they are also subject to the FSA complaint handling waiver.

stevekranz I don't understand some of your points. Given that your account (presumably) has online statementing, not correcting your address isn't very relevant. You could have seen your statements and balance online at any point. There is no such thing as "didn't send any statements". If you get online statements, you get an e-mail each month telling you to check your transactions. If you are not receiving those e-mails it is more than likely due to a junk mail filter problem. (I get them religiously each month, sent to both my e-mail address and my wife's, as it's a joint account).

carled The fact that online transfers between un-linked accounts are not instant is not hidden away. You just assumed that they were instant. If you transfer funds from a linked account, then the transfer is instant and your available balance increases immediately. When you made the payment, immediately following the transfer, your available balance would not have reflected the transfer so I'm unsure why you would have imagined the funds were available? The FOS's ruling makes sense, as A&L have done nothing wrong. They've simply applied their Ts & Cs which you have not understood.

carled

MarkyMarkD wrote: »

carled The fact that online transfers between un-linked accounts are not instant is not hidden away. You just assumed that they were instant. If you transfer funds from a linked account, then the transfer is instant and your available balance increases immediately. When you made the payment, immediately following the transfer, your available balance would not have reflected the transfer so I'm unsure why you would have imagined the funds were available? The FOS's ruling makes sense, as A&L have done nothing wrong. They've simply applied their Ts & Cs which you have not understood.

Thanks MarkyMarkD, I appreciate your time and trouble to answer so many posts, including mine. However I still take issue with what the A&L did. I don't know what a "linked account" is (to be honest as both accounts are in my name and are identical current accounts I can't see why they weren't linked in some way, but that's by the by). I actually did the transfer of the larger amount first. I realised as I was sending the amount that I didn't have quite enough in the account to cover the amount I was paying out, but rather than have to go through setting up the new payee all over again (the A&L online banking system doesn't save the new payee until you finish the transfer) I just thought it would be child's play to transfer a covering amount in from my other account.

What I think I object to is that they somehow engineered a "debit before credit" action overnight and processed the outgoing amount to a completely different bank before crediting my account from the other account I held with them. I KNOW that it's computer driven and I KNOW that technically for a period of hours minutes or seconds I was overdrawn, but by the time I was in the account again the next day, the balance WAS in credit because the charges hadn't yet been processed, otherwise I'd have been alerted to the problem more quickly. As it was, they then hit me with a £25 charge that they wrote to me about some days later.

I immediately queried this with them (via a call to the rottweiler manning the phones) and explained the whole situation, pointed out that it was surely only a matter of a technicality that the account had been briefly overdrawn and surely they could see that it made sense to credit back the charge. It was at that point that I was told about the further £25 that I'd now incurred and things got a bit messy... I told them to stop all activity on the account as I was now going to write to their head office to complain and that whilst I was disputing the debt with them I did not want them to continue to use their generated overdraft to continue to charge me.

They did tell me that they'd put a note on the system, but that the computer would "probably" keep adding the charges anyway... which history shows they did.

What I think my real issue is (aside from the whole illegality... I hope... of bank charges) is the way they used a moronic computerised system to almost trap me then just kept adding charge upon charge, even after I immediately told them that I was not going to use the account and I was going to dispute the charge. They didn't even stop adding the charges once the FOS were involved, it seemed to be an A&L decision to "freeze" the account once it got to a level they considered worth pursuing.

Anyhow, I think that this is EXACTLY the kind of "spirit of the law" not the "letter of the law" idiocy that the FOS should be pursuing, rather than simply pointing at an obscure part of the bank's T's and C's about transfers (even internal ones) (let's also not forget that the bank's T's and C's allow them to charge us all ludicrous amounts in account charges and the like, which are now being reclaimed in court, so the T's and C's aren't worth much there, are they?) to get them off the hook.

I think there is a certain amount of "reasonable expectation" here and the fact that some months prior to my transfer, someone buying my wife's car had transferred money from his bank (Natwest) to my wife's (first direct) and the transfer had gone through immediately (we called to check) led me to believe that this was the norm, particularly when transferring money internally...

Yeah, yeah, I know that in black and white it comes down to "it's in the t's and c's so tough ducklings" but that's not really the entire picture in this case...

So if I refuse to pay up... and the A&L pursue this through the court, this could be interesting as surely then they'd have to try and prove that bank charges are legal... Or will the court automatically stay any action that they raise as it relates to bank charges, hmmm?

carled

Wow. Game over. Got fed up with the case worker on my case at Ombudsman so requested to go above him. Got call from his line manager yesterday and confirmation letter today that she's been in touch with A&L on my complaint (see just above) and they've agreed to refund all charges without further question.

Result! :j

maintenanceman

Congrats carled. I am glad you were successful. It has given me inspiration to rejuvinate my claim against A&L.
MarkymarkD You have made a few assumptions and suppositions which have led you to be completly incorrect.. You are not in a position to form an informed opinion or 'balanced' reply because you don't have all the facts.

BelfastGirl_2

I decided some time ago to change my current account from A&L to another bank; I'd got pretty fed up with the way in which A&L applied their charges. I was not in a position to pay off my overdraft in full, and gradually reduced it each month. I received a letter from them (quite amazing in itself) telling me about the revised charges 50p/£5 per day, and had reduced my overdraft to £200 from £750 giving me a massive 4 days notice (by the time the letter arrived). Got the overdraft down, just in time! But maximum of £5 a month is a lot on a £200 overdraft! So I decided to pull out the stops, get it paid off and then close the account. I ensured there were no more charges due to be levied (had a balance of about £2.50), and phoned them up to close the account after transferring the balance to another account. Was told there had to be no activity on the account for 7 days - no problem!

So about 10 days later I get a letter saying the account is closed and a cheque for any outstanding amount from the account will be forwarded to me. I'd cleared the account, so didn't expect anything, so imagine my suprise when a day or 2 later another letter from A&L with a cheque in it. I couldn't believe it, and I doubly couldn't believe that they would actually post me a cheque, first class, for a massive £0.01! Wonder what the admin charge on that would be!!?

MarkyMarkD

maintenanceman wrote: »

Congrats carled. I am glad you were successful. It has given me inspiration to rejuvinate my claim against A&L.
MarkymarkD You have made a few assumptions and suppositions which have led you to be completly incorrect.. You are not in a position to form an informed opinion or 'balanced' reply because you don't have all the facts.

I can't see what assumptions I've made. You said you went overdrawn because of underfunding the account. What's your problem with that? If you don't post adequate details of your concerns, because you are too busy ranting, then you aren't likely to get a response which fully address your personal circumstances.

radish_radish

A and L said they would refund my account but haven't. Has anyone else experienced this?

evilgiraf

Hi all,

Can someone tell me how I stand in relation to these charges issued by A&L:
I have a Premier Direct Account which requires a Credit of £500/month. As I had transferred my Mortgage away from A&L, my intention was to close this account and so transferred my balance away. However, A&L took £5 and I did not notice that I had gone O/D until I received a letter from A&L stating an oustanding debit of £80 on the account.
I immediately tranferred money to the account and called A&L to work out what the problem was. They informed me that they would look into it but that there would be another £100 of charges to pay. The total amount charged now stands at £190 (!)

Can I claim these fees back either in full or in part?