Anyone using Yorkshire Bank business account?

ripvanmarlowe

I see Yorkshire Bank is offering 25 months of free business banking for new businesses or switching customers and I've just ran out of my free 18 months with Santander. Has anyone been using them? Any problems or horror stories or alternatively, any glowing reviews? Switching will save me about £240 a year in charges so I'm quite keen...

Zanderman

We switched to YB business banking last year. No problems in running the account so far, so that's all good.

Biggest issue for us was the extraordinary length of time they took to open the account - several months. And then they messed up the switching process, taking ages at first and then, ironically after all their delays, switching a week earlier than we asked - which they had no right to do, contravening a direct signed instruction on their own form and which lost us access to the old account before we'd downloaded all the statements. A complaint was upheld!

Since then, no worries. But do note that they have very few branches in the south, so visiting a branch might be difficult depending on where you are.

And whilst they do allow pay-ins at a Post Office we haven't yet tried that, and it was suggested to us that they might charge for that as that service is, possibly, outside the free for 25 months scheme. Haven't tested that yet though, and even if they did charge for PO pay-ins it would still be a good offer overall.

ripvanmarlowe

Thanks Zanderman, that seems like a really long time! Do you feel like that was a one off? Did they appologise for the delay or anything?

Zanderman

ripvanmarlowe wrote: »

Thanks Zanderman, that seems like a really long time! Do you feel like that was a one off? Did they appologise for the delay or anything?

They did apologise for the delay - but didn't, at the time, seem to be able to do anything about it.

I suspect that at the time they may have been overwhelmed by a deluge of applications, for personal and business accounts, as their various switching offers, including the personal one which could be applied for repeatedly, were in full swing. So that might account for the slow process. Also they did absolutely everything on paper forms - which might have changed since.

So I would hope it would be faster now...