My Advice Avoid Ulster Bank And Bank Of Ireland...

Richee_2

I recently undertook Ulster and Bank of Ireland credit cards from recommendations on the moneysavingexpert website and found their process of balance transfers appalling.
Firstly Ulster only give you minimal credit and thus gaining increases is a very tricky process involving proving other income/savings and takes up to 5-10 working days, hovering towards the 10.
My 0% deal with Ulster was coming to an end on 22nd July 2007, so I duly applied for the Bank of Ireland 2 weeks before this date. I encountered the following issues:
Delays in security clearance as they had not registered my address correctly and thus was different to the evidence I provided on my proof of address.
Once I had clarified this matter on the telephone I was then told that the balance transfer would take 5-10 working days from around the 22nd July.
It took them until the 8th August to send a draft (a cheque) to Ulster Bank - 17 days. I was then told it will take a further 5-10 working days.
Upon receiving the draft Ulster bank then could not process the cheque as it did not have a giro attached to it (i.e. bank details of Bank of Ireland), thus it had to be sent to their clearing department, which takes 3-4 working days.
My balance transfer cleared on the 30th August 2007. 22 days after Bank of Ireland had sent the cheque, and 39 days after going through Bank of Irelands security checks.
Bank of Ireland still said I owed them the balance transfer from the 8th August even though their cheque did not clear until the 30th August, so for 22days I effectively owed Bank of Ireland and Ulster bank the same balance.
MY ADVICE AVOID ULSTER BANK AND BANK OF IRELAND...

YorkshireBoy

Other than being 'responsible' with their credit limit setting (when you applied some 8 months ago), I'm struggling to understand why your advice is to avoid Ulster Bank.

After all, from what you've written, the problems were entirely of your own making (2 weeks is cutting it more than a bit fine, since best practice appears to be to apply 6 weeks before 0% expiry), and the peculiarities of the BOI BT process.

sicker

I've got an Ulster Bank credit card. No problems what so ever.

John

frivolous_fay

I applied for an Ulster card and they never bothered to get back to me.