Halifax and BOS closing my accounts

tg99

enterprising2016 wrote: »

Hi TG99, wondering if there is any update on your Halifax / BOS accounts? Hope your complaint went through?

Following on from my last update on this thread, I emailed LBG CEO office with my complaint about the account closures. After a couple of days I had a call from the 'Executive Complaints team' who took forward my complaint, however, their response was as expected in that the department responsible would not reverse the decision and would not provide the reason why they were being closed. I asked for a list of all my accounts being closed and they ran through all the Lloyds, Halifax and BOS ones but no mention of my Birmingham Midshires Savings or iWeb accounts. I had a discussion with the lady from the EXec Complaints team subsequently regarding some further questions I had:

- I speculated that my accounts may have been closed due to just using for interest / switching and thus unprofitable however she insisted several times that "LBG do not close unprofitable customer accounts".

- she confirmed that no CIFAS or anything affecting my credit record would come from LBG as a result of the closures

- any products I try to open in the future that fall under LBG brands will either be unsuccessful at application stage or closed down shortly afterwards including things like investments, home insurance, ISA (eg through Scottish Widows) etc.

- I asked if it was a life ban and her response was "it is for the foreseeable future but maybe if in 25 years things have changed......."

- I asked what would happen if LBG acquired another bank or financial company that I have accounts with and she said in that scenario the accounts would also be closed down though if they included long term investments for example "we might let you keep them"....using home insurance as an example, they would let the policy run to its end date but then I would not be able to renew it.

A few weeks later at start of April I received a letter from Birmingham Midshires giving me 2 months notice my account would be closed; and then at start of May got letter from iWeb saying my account would be closed too. Spoke to both of them but unsurprisingly were not able to give me a reason.

So that's all of my LBG products covered now. I'm not sure why it took another few months for Birmingham Midshires and iWeb to decide to close my accounts as I would have thought they would have been notified for closure at start Feb like my others. Perhaps info is only shared on an ad hoc basis or something between some of its brands. But suggests that the reason for closure does not stem from anything to do with Birmingham Midshires or iWeb.

I'm still going to do a FOS complaint since nothing to lose and won't take long and may do a SAR too to Lloyds but obviously not expecting anything to change and much less bothered now really. Kind of annoying not knowing why the accounts were closed. As noted earlier, no strange payments in or out, excellent credit record, no unrecorded searches or CIFAS, never gone into overdraft etc as just used accounts for savings and switching.If I had to guess, I'd say maybe for some reason I've come up on whatever algorithm they use to calculate risks scores and I've breached their acceptable level, perhaps because of the number of accounts I've opened, the fact I've switched away two from Halifax etc. (She also stated that it was pure coincidence that the account closure letter in Feb was same date as when switched second Halifax account elsewhere).

GingerFurball_2

FOS complaint will get you nowhere. As long as Lloyds can show that they provided you with the appropriate notice period it won't be upheld.

tg99

GingerFurball wrote: »

FOS complaint will get you nowhere. As long as Lloyds can show that they provided you with the appropriate notice period it won't be upheld.

As noted previously it is obviously very unlikely to be successful but given its going to take very little time I consider it worth doing as the chance of it being upheld is not quite zero (having googled a while ago there were one or two cases where the decision was reversed once the FOS got involved).

YorkshireBoy

tg99 wrote: »

I'm not sure why it took another few months for Birmingham Midshires and iWeb to decide to close my accounts...

Maybe it was as a direct result of your conversation with the Exec Complaints Office which was then passed on, and you inadvertently shot yourself in the foot by mentioning your other accounts?

tg99

YorkshireBoy wrote: »

Maybe it was as a direct result of your conversation with the Exec Complaints Office which was then passed on, and you inadvertently shot yourself in the foot by mentioning your other accounts?

No as I deliberately never mentioned these other accounts for that exact reason. As an aside, the person at LBG did not appear to be able to see these other accounts on her systems as when I asked her to confirm that all my accounts were being closed including the regular savers etc she read me out all the LBG accounts I had once she had gone into my details and did not mention these other two.

Ed-1

tg99 wrote: »

No as I deliberately never mentioned these other accounts for that exact reason. As an aside, the person at LBG did not appear to be able to see these other accounts on her systems as when I asked her to confirm that all my accounts were being closed including the regular savers etc she read me out all the LBG accounts I had once she had gone into my details and did not mention these other two.

LBG have a central office in Brighton where their teams (including the account review team) can access all your accounts with Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland. They're all connected within the same customer profile and risk system - e.g. you apply to Lloyds and you get a profile set up with HBOS automatically. They share the same risk systems - activity on Lloyds accounts affects the risk bank with HBOS and vice versa. Scottish Widows and Birmingham Midshires etc. don't. They are like M&S Bank and HSBC - they don't share the same customer profile systems and are run as separate entities within the same group. Account closure decisions affect Lloyds Bank and HBOS accounts and the application teams at Lloyds Bank and HBOS can also access all data under both profiles and see applications made with the other (Lloyds Bank or HBOS) but not with any smaller outfits like Scottish Widows.

However of course as BM and SW are in the same banking group they reserve the right to share information with them and eventually they have done.

alternate

Bizarre. I have no idea why this happened to you but I very much doubt they banned you for life/25 years because you were unprofitable or had too many accounts. Goes way beyond that.

It seems pretty clear they think you are a very dodgy individual for whatever reason.

smjxm09

Wonder if you ever used your debit cards which might have triggered something? I got a letter from Santander about me not using my debit cards with them not even for a mini statement.

Gers

smjxm09 wrote: »

Wonder if you ever used your debit cards which might have triggered something? I got a letter from Santander about me not using my debit cards with them not even for a mini statement.

I got a similar letter from Santander though it was about if I wanted a new debit card as I'd never used my original one for a payment and it was due for renewal.

If I wanted a new card then I just had to use it once, either for paying in a shop or at an ATM. I had in fact used it twice to withdraw cash from the counter teller but this didn't count.

I withdrew some cash from an ATM so all should be well.

Ed-1

alternate wrote: »

Bizarre. I have no idea why this happened to you but I very much doubt they banned you for life/25 years because you were unprofitable or had too many accounts. Goes way beyond that.

It seems pretty clear they think you are a very dodgy individual for whatever reason.

Wouldn't count on it. I opened 10 accounts online with RBS group banks including Natwest to switch to Yorkshire Bank for the switching offer at the start of last year and they banned me! LBG closed my accounts at the time as well due to no longer meeting their credit scoring criteria (my credit file searches must have drawn attention to my activity on their monthly feed so they decided to do a series of unrecorded enquiries to look into it - applying for a couple of accounts with them at the same time obviously intended also to switch but declined at stage 2 didn't help in hindsight) but haven't banned me as I'm back with them.