Has anyone opened a business account recently?

vet8

I am asking this as I am curious if anyone else has had the aggro I have.

I wrote on here 2 months ago how TSB has closed our business account by mistake, they admitted it was their mistake, but the only way to rectify this was for me to fill in a new application and open a new account. This annoyed me as I cannot see why they cannot use the information from the old account to open a new one.

Anyway I filled in the on-line application form 2 weeks ago. !!!!!! what a palaver! It took half an hour and asked all kinds of endless, hard-to-answer questions; my absolute favourite was when I had to list all the different jobs our company does, say if we charge by the hour, day, job etc., then say how many hours we do a day, how many days a week and how many weeks a year. If your firm does several different things it could take all day to fill this in. When I had finally done the form and checked it I sent it off. The message that came up said they would phone me Why? then send a form to sign .

No phone call, no form so after 2 weeks I phoned them. Then the fun really started. I spoke to a woman after a very long wait and she asked me several questions I had already answered, then she got stuck on one of the questions she was supposed to ask so I phoned back the next day. I rang four times, the first three were cut off after 5 minutes on hold, the last was eventually answered after 15 minutes on hold. Now I had to go through virtually all the questions I had answered on the on-line form, plus a whole lot more of what seemed to be totally irrelevant and nosey questions. It really was the Spanish inquisition. To virtually every question I replied "Why are you asking me this?" or" I have already answered that on the on-line form". When he started to go through this bit about listing each job and saying how many hours etc. you spend on it I did my nut and refused to answer any more. I had now spent over an hour on the phone. What is the point in applying on-line if they are going to ask you the same bloody questions on the phone anyway.

The reason I am going on about this is that the papers keep saying that more and more people are starting up businesses and working for themselves, do they all have to go through this ridiculous third degree to get a bank account? Even the TSB man said the questions were intrusive. And of course meanwhile the scammers and crooks seem to open bank accounts every day with impunity, it is only law-abiding people who are affected.

Slinky

It took 4 months for the Co-op to open an account for me. Ltd company been trading over 10 years but they didn't bother to ask for company accounts, just loads of pointless questions. In the end I don't even need the account as RBS were going to start charging me but now aren't.

will-he-payitoff

I used Yorkshire bank and got 25 months free banking. Very easy to set up, website is a bit of a pain until you get used to it. Only any use if theres one in your area though.