My credit card balance transfer story

DavidT

I thought I would relate my credit card story. I don’t need any advice but hopefully this may be of some use to others. I finally resolved this myself without resorting to the Financial Ombudsman but only just and its taken over seven months to do so!


Basically I had a Santander credit card with around £550 on it. I took out a new credit card with the Post Office in September 2011 (I don’t have any others) and decided to take advantage of their 0% balance transfer option. All I had to provide was my Santander card number and the amount to be transferred. I did this online and all appeared well. All the relevant paperwork came through and I thought that was it until………….


My next statements came in from both Santander and the Post Office both showing I owed each of them £550! Thus started a long chain of events which to keep matters short consisted of numerous responses from the Post Office saying they had sent the money to Santander and Santander responding each time saying they had never received any money. I was stuck in the middle not knowing and having no way of finding out which of them was correct. I have a mountain of correspondence about this but 95% of it is useless in terms of solving anything.


Eventually the Post Office issued a final response letter telling me they had done everything correctly and to go to the ombudsman if I wasn’t happy. In the meantime I was still chasing Santander. After four months the Post Office did finally give me a piece of paper showing the actual details of the BACS transfer which I passed on to Santander. I strongly suspect at this stage the Post Office did know they had erred because they did ring me up and asked me to confirm the sort code and bank account I usually paid Santander which was completely different to where they had sent the money. Now they must have rung me for a specific reason to ask just this mustn’t they?


Anyway eventually Santander came back to me having after seven months found my money! It turns out Santander have two different divisions and the Post Office had sent it to the wrong one. I now have my money and the Post Office is paying me substantial compensation.


I’ve cut out a lot of this as it could get very long winded but the points I want to make and which may be useful to others are:

1)During the process I ended up paying each of them every month as I had no way of knowing who was in the wrong and I didn’t want to damage my credit record.
2)The whole dispute process is a joke really. Early on I offered to sign an authority so the Post Office and Santander could speak to each other directly as it seemed to me this was the obvious way to find out what had happened. Post Office refused to entertain this idea. Instead effectively it was me who sorted this out. Post Office had closed their file and Santander had nearly done so too. Most of the responses seemed to consist of running standard checks without anyone actually putting any human effort in to finding out what had actually happened. Just seemed a continual process of each blaming the other without doing anything to sort it out.
3)Post Office told me they had other customers with exactly the same problem involving balance transfers from Santander. Common sense therefore would dictate they must have been aware there was an underlying problem.
4) Importantly the Post Office is not part of the AUDDIS system. I have a letter from them saying they took a business decision not to join it. It also said if they had joined it the money would have gone to right place! I don’t know what system the Post Office use but it was clearly out of date and didn’t work.
5)Not being able to get the accounts suspended whilst it was being investigated and therefore having to pay both of them.

My overriding concern was how hard it was to get a simple issue sorted out. I got so little help from the dispute process (particularly from the Post Office) and it shouldn’t be like that. It was basically left to me to prove they had done something wrong rather than them showing they had done it correctly. That was very hard as I had no concrete information to go on and no idea who was at fault. I wonder if it had happened to someone with a large balance transfer getting two statements every month how they would cope.

My advice to anyone thinking of using the Post Office Credit Card for a balance transfer is to be very careful. They clearly have a system that isn’t always up to date and if my experience is anything to go by you will have a hell of a time sorting it out.