NatWest: Denial of service

jamesd

samizdat wrote: »

In my own, obviously anecdotal, experience, NatWest operate an incompetent system, much worse than others I have encountered.

If you want a worse one, try Santander. From repeated personal experience with their security team you can't even rely on getting them to tell you if an account is blocked, what activities will be blocked, whether they have removed all blocks or whether a transaction that they have unblocked will be processed or canceled.

They seem to have a pretty poor automatic tool false positive rate as well and I assume that's contributing to the very poor customer service level in this area. I also assume that it is reflected in the quality of their SOCA reporting, which would be pretty horrendous if it's anything like as bad as the customer side experience.

jamesd

samizdat wrote: »

Well, this is why I invited people to share their own stories in my original post. I had hoped to find examples of better practice than at NatWest.

Try First Direct. I've been subject to an investigation by them where it seems likely that they suspected layering and they conducted it professionally and competently so far as I could tell from the customer side and information requested.

I was less happy with being told to cease the profitable use I was making of the account to reduce their risk even though it wasn't a breach of account conditions or the law (in their opinion as well as mine) but I can understand them wanting to engage in layering or other criminal action risk reduction.

CKhalvashi

jamesd wrote: »

Try First Direct. I've been subject to an investigation by them where it seems likely that they suspected layering and they conducted it professionally and competently so far as I could tell from the customer side and information requested.

I was less happy with being told to cease the profitable use I was making of the account to reduce their risk even though it wasn't a breach of account conditions or the law (in their opinion as well as mine) but I can understand them not wanting to engage in layering or other criminal action risk reduction.

Just thought I’d slip that in :eek:

opinions4u

CKhalvashi wrote: »

Just thought I’d slip that in :eek:

Surely they do want to engage in layering risk reduction.

jamesd

CKhalvashi, nice try but you were perhaps confused by the sentence structure.

samizdat

jamesd wrote: »

Try First Direct. I've been subject to an investigation by them where it seems likely that they suspected layering and they conducted it professionally and competently so far as I could tell from the customer side and information requested.

I was less happy with being told to cease the profitable use I was making of the account to reduce their risk even though it wasn't a breach of account conditions or the law (in their opinion as well as mine) but I can understand them wanting to engage in layering or other criminal action risk reduction.

I am with First Direct also (mortgage and current a/c). I find their security arrangements a bit daft also, but don't want to elaborate for "operational" reasons.

Intrigued by your comments about curtailment of "profitable use" - what was that about?

jamesd

It's possible to get interest paid at one account and also offset at FD in the same day by moving money between the accounts after the close of business of the interest paying account and before the close of business of the FD account. To do so requires intraday movement of money between the accounts so it naturally can produce quite large and frequent transfers that could resemble a layering scheme.

samizdat

jamesd wrote: »

It's possible to get interest paid at one account and also offset at FD in the same day by moving money between the accounts after the close of business of the interest paying account and before the close of business of the FD account. To do so requires intraday movement of money between the accounts so it naturally can produce quite large and frequent transfers that could resemble a layering scheme.

Oh, yes, I know about that little ruse, but I have to say I sympahise with the bank's stance on this, which is unusual for me!