Two years of confusion over

sammi.jo

Hi there, I don't know if this is of any relevance to anybody on here, but on the off-chance that it is, I'll post it.

History:
I'm 24 and have a terrible credit rating. This is because I had an overdraft with NatWest bank the moment I turned 18 and due to bad personal circumstances, only paid this off this year. However, I got an account with Alliance and Leicester (now Santander obviously) and have had this for six years (from the moment my old NatWest account defaulted).

Three years into opening the account I asked for a £50 overdraft. This got completely refused, and a nice letter saying something about a credit rating. However, they let me upgrade to a 'Premier Direct' account, where I had to pay in £400 a month into the account (easy) and I'd get some decent credit interest.

I started uni in September but didn't do anything about my account. In December, my mum died and left me a bit of money. It got paid into the Santander account and I applied for a student account in February, to make ends meet and not have to spend that. Instantly rejected. Charming. So I applied for a Halifax account, which was APPROVED with a £250 overdraft, no questions asked. I was a bit miffed, but happy.

I applied for my Santander account to be downgraded as I wasn't paying money into it any more. They sent me out a form, I filled it out and.. rejected. Rejected for an account that had FEWER benefits than my previous one

Now:
Last week, I applied for a student account again, as my money is in bonds and I wanted the security (and benefits!) of such account. Halifax turned me down (hadn't been with them long enough), so I applied again to Santander. I applied online and heard NOTHING from them. At the end of my tether, I went into the branch and asked the woman what on earth was going on. She saw no record of me applying for an account, so applied again. Instantly rejected.

Here's where it got odd. She wasn't satisfied with this at all. She couldn't understand how I'd been with them for so long, and been rejected like this. She phoned up some other department, and the outcome was that I had many PROFILES on their system, and therefore it wasn't matching up with my credit reference file. Instant decline, and all the searches going against me.

She sat with me and made all of the profiles match up (the addresses were different, from when I'd moved house). She told me she'd wait overnight for it to happen and call me back the next day.

Indeed, the next day she'd phoned me back. I'D BEEN ACCEPTED. :T Overnight, the profiles (not accounts) had been merged into one, and everything had matched up for the credit search. Overdraft: check. Benefits of student account: check. I went in to sign some papers with her, and the account number and sort code was given to me on the spot. They're also going to remove the searches from my credit file.

The moral of the story is: if you're getting rejected for credit with a bank you've been with for AGES, and you're sure you haven't been a victim of fraud, ask them to check their own records for fluidity. I'd spent god knows how long thinking I was doing something wrong. It was their fault!

So I'm happy to say that I'm debt free AND being given credit. :rotfl: