Nationwide slow customer service

epm-84

@masonic - I don't think any of your posts in this thread can be described as helpful.  You started by strongly disagreeing with a suggestion I made about how Nationwide may be processing ISA requests and have subsequently disagreed with something I've said in each post since.  You even tried to defend Nationwide's 0.25% rate as not being one of the worst on the market, until I questioned whether any of the even lower rates had Nationwide's withdrawal restrictions.

masonic

epm-84 said:

@masonic - I don't think any of your posts in this thread can be described as helpful.

If you don't find my posts helpful, you are welcome to stop reading them. I'll take no offence.

epm-84 said:

You started by strongly disagreeing with a suggestion I made about how Nationwide may be processing ISA requests and have subsequently disagreed with something I've said in each post since.

The suggestion was that Nationwide was deliberately and systematically slowing down the processing of high value ISA transfers in order to stem the tide of money flowing out of the organisation. It's a pretty extraordinary claim to make and one that was bound to invite some challenge, if not by me then by someone else.

This is a discussion forum, so you should expect that when someone disagrees with you they will enter into a discussion with you. Yes, I disagreed with your views and I gave reasons for my disagreement. You disbelieved my reasoning and asked me some follow up questions. I responded to those questions and clarified my reasoning. In subsequent posts, all I was doing was defending my arguments and reasoning from your attacks, and pointing out where you have mischaracterised what I wrote.

Here we have another example:

epm-84 said:

You even tried to defend Nationwide's 0.25% rate as not being one of the worst on the market, until I questioned whether any of the even lower rates had Nationwide's withdrawal restrictions.

I have not expressed a view about whether or not Nationwide's 0.25% is one of the worst on the market. What I stated was "I can assure you that I do understand your point and my maths is good enough to know that even the 0.25% offered for the triple access ISA is more than 0.07%."

This makes no reference to any other savings account on the market, but I did not drop "even" into that sentence for no reason. I'd consider 0.25% to be a very poor rate, even if it were an easy access account. To my knowledge there are no "worst buy" tables for savings accounts, so I can't say more than that.

The 0.07% is the short term LIBOR rate I introduced in an earlier post. I made this clear a couple of paragraphs later when I wrote: "They could lend it on the short term money markets, but 1 week LIBOR is currently at 0.07% so they'll be making a loss if they try to hang on to the money for an extra week or two vs. closing down the account and releasing themselves from the interest burden ASAP."

I'm sure nobody else is finding this discussion particularly helpful, so if you aren't either there is no point in continuing it beyond this point. I'm happy to draw a line under it if you are.

metrobus

Proud to be different.

maybe stop paying the directors their huge salaries and employ a few more.

nhquine

I finally got the ISA transferred this was the Nationwide response to my complaint regarding the delay

Nationwide  response

"... Firstly, I would like to apologise for the delay with your ISA transfer. I can confirm that this was received on 08 April 2020 and the funds should have been sent on 21 April 2020, however, there appears to have been a fault with the system and this did not happen. As the system thought the process was complete nothing further was done with the transfer and I apologise for this

"... I have arranged for the funds to be transferred by CHAPS so they should now be with Coventry today. As we are outside the 15 working day timescale for an ISA transfer, they should backdate the funds when they apply them to your account, ensuring you do not lose out on any interest. However, if they do not do this please provide evidence to Nationwide xxxxx and I will consider reimbursing you for the loss of interest..."

"... Whilst I don’t believe it’s appropriate to cover the cost for your time, I would like to offer you the sum of £100, to say how sorry we are for the inconvenience caused..."

Coventry Building Society response 

 Re: ISA Transfer. Thanks for your message 

"....To address the information Nationwide have provided you with regards to backdating the funds, this isn't something we're in a position to do as the delay has been caused by them.

Because there have been such a high number of transfers affected by the issues Nationwide have been experiencing we've notified them that this isn't something we can do and are advising our affected members to pursue any loss of interest with Nationwide."

I agree it was no fault of the Coventry, so they should not be liable for lost interest, throughout they were very helpful in keeping me updated of  the unsuccessful attempts they made to the Nationwide.  

At the same time the Nationwide were very bad at responding to my emails other than template replies which did nothing to fix the issue. It was only resolved after writing to the Chief Executive Joe Garner. (Unlikely he read it, but it seemed to provoke action at a higher level to finally move my ISA)

Breadcake

nhquine said:

I finally got the ISA transferred this was the Nationwide response to my complaint regarding the delay

Nationwide  response

"... Firstly, I would like to apologise for the delay with your ISA transfer. I can confirm that this was received on 08 April 2020 and the funds should have been sent on 21 April 2020, however, there appears to have been a fault with the system and this did not happen. As the system thought the process was complete nothing further was done with the transfer and I apologise for this

"... I have arranged for the funds to be transferred by CHAPS so they should now be with Coventry today. As we are outside the 15 working day timescale for an ISA transfer, they should backdate the funds when they apply them to your account, ensuring you do not lose out on any interest. However, if they do not do this please provide evidence to Nationwide xxxxx and I will consider reimbursing you for the loss of interest..."

"... Whilst I don’t believe it’s appropriate to cover the cost for your time, I would like to offer you the sum of £100, to say how sorry we are for the inconvenience caused..."

Coventry Building Society response 

 Re: ISA Transfer. Thanks for your message 

"....To address the information Nationwide have provided you with regards to backdating the funds, this isn't something we're in a position to do as the delay has been caused by them.

Because there have been such a high number of transfers affected by the issues Nationwide have been experiencing we've notified them that this isn't something we can do and are advising our affected members to pursue any loss of interest with Nationwide."

I agree it was no fault of the Coventry, so they should not be liable for lost interest, throughout they were very helpful in keeping me updated of  the unsuccessful attempts they made to the Nationwide.  

At the same time the Nationwide were very bad at responding to my emails other than template replies which did nothing to fix the issue. It was only resolved after writing to the Chief Executive Joe Garner. (Unlikely he read it, but it seemed to provoke action at a higher level to finally move my ISA)

I agree in this instance the blame lands at Nationwide, I presume you're going to provide them evidence of Coventry not accepting responsibility (and rightly so). My impression is Nationwide are checking you're not receiving interest from both banks.

Unclear as to your next actions but I would accept interest reimbursement from Nationwide along with the £100 apology (equivalent to circa 2 months interest) and move on, Nationwide can then get back to having their resources helping people who've suffered job losses and don't have as much (if any) money in their accounts.

epm-84

masonic said:

epm-84 said:

@masonic - I don't think any of your posts in this thread can be described as helpful.

If you don't find my posts helpful, you are welcome to stop reading them. I'll take no offence.

epm-84 said:

You started by strongly disagreeing with a suggestion I made about how Nationwide may be processing ISA requests and have subsequently disagreed with something I've said in each post since.

The suggestion was that Nationwide was deliberately and systematically slowing down the processing of high value ISA transfers in order to stem the tide of money flowing out of the organisation. It's a pretty extraordinary claim to make and one that was bound to invite some challenge, if not by me then by someone else.

This is a discussion forum, so you should expect that when someone disagrees with you they will enter into a discussion with you. Yes, I disagreed with your views and I gave reasons for my disagreement. You disbelieved my reasoning and asked me some follow up questions. I responded to those questions and clarified my reasoning. In subsequent posts, all I was doing was defending my arguments and reasoning from your attacks, and pointing out where you have mischaracterised what I wrote.

Here we have another example:

epm-84 said:

You even tried to defend Nationwide's 0.25% rate as not being one of the worst on the market, until I questioned whether any of the even lower rates had Nationwide's withdrawal restrictions.

I have not expressed a view about whether or not Nationwide's 0.25% is one of the worst on the market. What I stated was "I can assure you that I do understand your point and my maths is good enough to know that even the 0.25% offered for the triple access ISA is more than 0.07%."

This makes no reference to any other savings account on the market, but I did not drop "even" into that sentence for no reason. I'd consider 0.25% to be a very poor rate, even if it were an easy access account. To my knowledge there are no "worst buy" tables for savings accounts, so I can't say more than that.

The 0.07% is the short term LIBOR rate I introduced in an earlier post. I made this clear a couple of paragraphs later when I wrote: "They could lend it on the short term money markets, but 1 week LIBOR is currently at 0.07% so they'll be making a loss if they try to hang on to the money for an extra week or two vs. closing down the account and releasing themselves from the interest burden ASAP."

I'm sure nobody else is finding this discussion particularly helpful, so if you aren't either there is no point in continuing it beyond this point. I'm happy to draw a line under it if you are.

It was a suggestion based on what people had posted about the transfer times for their ISA.  Some with high credit amounts who were switching to providers using electronic transfers were finding their transfers were only just being done within 15 days or were taking slightly longer, yet others with low balances were saying their transfers went through in an acceptable time frame.  As a few reports is not enough to make a claim based on a representative sample I made it clear that what I posted was a suggestion, not a fact. 

The point about your Maths was when you ignored what I said about £90,000 going out of the building society being £90,000 going out of the building society whether it's the balance from one account or the combined balance of 9 separate accounts. You went off on a tangent about the balance being irrelevant to the amount of time needed to work on the transfer.  I knew that and tried to explain again, you claimed you did understand but then effectively wrote the same response again using different words.  As I did A Levels Maths I thought maybe I'm not explaining it in a way which you were able to understand if haven't studied Maths to an advanced level.  You then went off on a further tangent by going on about LIBORs as proof your Maths is good enough for you to explain your argument.

What seems very clear (and a number of financial journalists have picked up on) is that Nationwide did not expect so many people to transfer their ISAs out so quickly after they dropped the interest rate and that they don't have enough staff to cope with all the requests.  Perhaps they thought their members would be more loyal then they actually are or that more people would 'wait and see' rather than switching immediately.  The LIBOR may be relevant in response to whether or not Nationwide might be prioritising transfer requests based on their balances.  However, the number of transfer requests they have received relates to the interest rate Nationwide are offering in relation to other banks and building societies.  As I pointed out the difference in interest rate between Nationwide's single access 'loyalty' ISA and Virgin Money's double take ISA was minimal, now it's significant - Nationwide aren't going to get loads of transfer requests because another provider is offering 0.05% more interest for a similar product (especially when the rates on both accounts are variable) but if they are offering 0.75% more interest for a similar product they will.  

epm-84

Breadcake said:

nhquine said:

I finally got the ISA transferred this was the Nationwide response to my complaint regarding the delay

Nationwide  response

"... Firstly, I would like to apologise for the delay with your ISA transfer. I can confirm that this was received on 08 April 2020 and the funds should have been sent on 21 April 2020, however, there appears to have been a fault with the system and this did not happen. As the system thought the process was complete nothing further was done with the transfer and I apologise for this

"... I have arranged for the funds to be transferred by CHAPS so they should now be with Coventry today. As we are outside the 15 working day timescale for an ISA transfer, they should backdate the funds when they apply them to your account, ensuring you do not lose out on any interest. However, if they do not do this please provide evidence to Nationwide xxxxx and I will consider reimbursing you for the loss of interest..."

"... Whilst I don’t believe it’s appropriate to cover the cost for your time, I would like to offer you the sum of £100, to say how sorry we are for the inconvenience caused..."

Coventry Building Society response 

 Re: ISA Transfer. Thanks for your message 

"....To address the information Nationwide have provided you with regards to backdating the funds, this isn't something we're in a position to do as the delay has been caused by them.

Because there have been such a high number of transfers affected by the issues Nationwide have been experiencing we've notified them that this isn't something we can do and are advising our affected members to pursue any loss of interest with Nationwide."

I agree it was no fault of the Coventry, so they should not be liable for lost interest, throughout they were very helpful in keeping me updated of  the unsuccessful attempts they made to the Nationwide.  

At the same time the Nationwide were very bad at responding to my emails other than template replies which did nothing to fix the issue. It was only resolved after writing to the Chief Executive Joe Garner. (Unlikely he read it, but it seemed to provoke action at a higher level to finally move my ISA)

I agree in this instance the blame lands at Nationwide, I presume you're going to provide them evidence of Coventry not accepting responsibility (and rightly so). My impression is Nationwide are checking you're not receiving interest from both banks.

Unclear as to your next actions but I would accept interest reimbursement from Nationwide along with the £100 apology (equivalent to circa 2 months interest) and move on, Nationwide can then get back to having their resources helping people who've suffered job losses and don't have as much (if any) money in their accounts.

Agreed.  Presumably Nationwide have credited interest until the day the money left them, even though from 1st May the interest would have been at a lower rate than what you would have got from Coventry.  Presuming the money is now with Coventry the compensation is equivalent to Coventry receiving the money 2 months earlier than they did, so they've compensated you for any loss plus some extra.

masonic

epm-84 said:

masonic said:

epm-84 said:

@masonic - I don't think any of your posts in this thread can be described as helpful.

If you don't find my posts helpful, you are welcome to stop reading them. I'll take no offence.

epm-84 said:

You started by strongly disagreeing with a suggestion I made about how Nationwide may be processing ISA requests and have subsequently disagreed with something I've said in each post since.

The suggestion was that Nationwide was deliberately and systematically slowing down the processing of high value ISA transfers in order to stem the tide of money flowing out of the organisation. It's a pretty extraordinary claim to make and one that was bound to invite some challenge, if not by me then by someone else.

This is a discussion forum, so you should expect that when someone disagrees with you they will enter into a discussion with you. Yes, I disagreed with your views and I gave reasons for my disagreement. You disbelieved my reasoning and asked me some follow up questions. I responded to those questions and clarified my reasoning. In subsequent posts, all I was doing was defending my arguments and reasoning from your attacks, and pointing out where you have mischaracterised what I wrote.

Here we have another example:

epm-84 said:

You even tried to defend Nationwide's 0.25% rate as not being one of the worst on the market, until I questioned whether any of the even lower rates had Nationwide's withdrawal restrictions.

I have not expressed a view about whether or not Nationwide's 0.25% is one of the worst on the market. What I stated was "I can assure you that I do understand your point and my maths is good enough to know that even the 0.25% offered for the triple access ISA is more than 0.07%."

This makes no reference to any other savings account on the market, but I did not drop "even" into that sentence for no reason. I'd consider 0.25% to be a very poor rate, even if it were an easy access account. To my knowledge there are no "worst buy" tables for savings accounts, so I can't say more than that.

The 0.07% is the short term LIBOR rate I introduced in an earlier post. I made this clear a couple of paragraphs later when I wrote: "They could lend it on the short term money markets, but 1 week LIBOR is currently at 0.07% so they'll be making a loss if they try to hang on to the money for an extra week or two vs. closing down the account and releasing themselves from the interest burden ASAP."

I'm sure nobody else is finding this discussion particularly helpful, so if you aren't either there is no point in continuing it beyond this point. I'm happy to draw a line under it if you are.

It was a suggestion based on what people had posted about the transfer times for their ISA.  Some with high credit amounts who were switching to providers using electronic transfers were finding their transfers were only just being done within 15 days or were taking slightly longer, yet others with low balances were saying their transfers went through in an acceptable time frame.  As a few reports is not enough to make a claim based on a representative sample I made it clear that what I posted was a suggestion, not a fact. 

We are in agreement that you made the suggestion that Nationwide was deliberately and systematically slowing down the processing of high value ISA transfers in order to stem the tide of money flowing out of the organisation. I referred to it as a suggestion in my previous post.

epm-84 said:

The point about your Maths was when you ignored what I said about £90,000 going out of the building society being £90,000 going out of the building society whether it's the balance from one account or the combined balance of 9 separate accounts. You went off on a tangent about the balance being irrelevant to the amount of time needed to work on the transfer.  I knew that and tried to explain again, you claimed you did understand but then effectively wrote the same response again using different words.  As I did A Levels Maths I thought maybe I'm not explaining it in a way which you were able to understand if haven't studied Maths to an advanced level.  You then went off on a further tangent by going on about LIBORs as proof your Maths is good enough for you to explain your argument.

You chose to insult my understanding of maths because you misunderstood, either genuinely or deliberately, the point I was making. The point I was making was that they needed to pay customers interest at a higher rate than they could earn it on short term cash. The balance is irrelevant, the comparison is between Balance x Rate_of_ISA (what Nationwide need to pay in interest) vs Balance x Rate_of_LIBOR (what Nationwide can earn in interest in a few days/weeks). If Rate_of_ISA is larger than Rate_of_LIBOR then their interest burden is larger than their interest earning potential, and that holds true for all positive values of Balance. As a consequence, Nationwide lose money by hanging on to funds, and they lose more money when Balance is larger. Therefore, it is not in their interests to do as you suggested (transfer 9 x £10k ISAs, but leave the 1 x £90k ISA, the most efficient way for them to process the ISAs is transfer the £90k ISA plus 8 of the £10k ISAs, leading to £170k leaving Nationwide vs £90k for the same amount of work).
So you can see it is rather elementary mathematics, and my maths is good enough to understand it.

epm-84 said:

What seems very clear (and a number of financial journalists have picked up on) is that Nationwide did not expect so many people to transfer their ISAs out so quickly after they dropped the interest rate and that they don't have enough staff to cope with all the requests.  Perhaps they thought their members would be more loyal then they actually are or that more people would 'wait and see' rather than switching immediately.  The LIBOR may be relevant in response to whether or not Nationwide might be prioritising transfer requests based on their balances.  However, the number of transfer requests they have received relates to the interest rate Nationwide are offering in relation to other banks and building societies.  As I pointed out the difference in interest rate between Nationwide's single access 'loyalty' ISA and Virgin Money's double take ISA was minimal, now it's significant - Nationwide aren't going to get loads of transfer requests because another provider is offering 0.05% more interest for a similar product (especially when the rates on both accounts are variable) but if they are offering 0.75% more interest for a similar product they will.  

What is known is that Nationwide received far more transfer requests than it could cope with, at a time when all ISA managers where under some strain. Perhaps Nationwide underestimated the volume of transfers they would receive, or perhaps they needed to shed that money ASAP and did what they thought would achieve that objective at the risk of overwhelming their limited capacity. We'll never know their true motivations, we seldom ever do.

Stenwold

epm-84 said:

What seems very clear (and a number of financial journalists have picked up on) is that Nationwide did not expect so many people to transfer their ISAs out so quickly after they dropped the interest rate and that they don't have enough staff to cope with all the requests.  Perhaps they thought their members would be more loyal then they actually are or that more people would 'wait and see' rather than switching immediately.  The LIBOR may be relevant in response to whether or not Nationwide might be prioritising transfer requests based on their balances.  However, the number of transfer requests they have received relates to the interest rate Nationwide are offering in relation to other banks and building societies.  As I pointed out the difference in interest rate between Nationwide's single access 'loyalty' ISA and Virgin Money's double take ISA was minimal, now it's significant - Nationwide aren't going to get loads of transfer requests because another provider is offering 0.05% more interest for a similar product (especially when the rates on both accounts are variable) but if they are offering 0.75% more interest for a similar product they will.  

You've mentioned a few times about Nationwide dropping the ball and seeing lots of customers move their funds away, but not acknowledged other posters pointing out it's very likely Nationwide needed to open the flood gates and say bye bye to a lot of funds in a short space of time - this was probably part of the plan.

It looks like there are some signs of mortgage applications starting to pick up, so it won't be too long until these financial institutions need to find a way to attract funds again.

epm-84

masonic said:

epm-84 said:

masonic said:

epm-84 said:

@masonic - I don't think any of your posts in this thread can be described as helpful.

If you don't find my posts helpful, you are welcome to stop reading them. I'll take no offence.

epm-84 said:

You started by strongly disagreeing with a suggestion I made about how Nationwide may be processing ISA requests and have subsequently disagreed with something I've said in each post since.

The suggestion was that Nationwide was deliberately and systematically slowing down the processing of high value ISA transfers in order to stem the tide of money flowing out of the organisation. It's a pretty extraordinary claim to make and one that was bound to invite some challenge, if not by me then by someone else.

This is a discussion forum, so you should expect that when someone disagrees with you they will enter into a discussion with you. Yes, I disagreed with your views and I gave reasons for my disagreement. You disbelieved my reasoning and asked me some follow up questions. I responded to those questions and clarified my reasoning. In subsequent posts, all I was doing was defending my arguments and reasoning from your attacks, and pointing out where you have mischaracterised what I wrote.

Here we have another example:

epm-84 said:

You even tried to defend Nationwide's 0.25% rate as not being one of the worst on the market, until I questioned whether any of the even lower rates had Nationwide's withdrawal restrictions.

I have not expressed a view about whether or not Nationwide's 0.25% is one of the worst on the market. What I stated was "I can assure you that I do understand your point and my maths is good enough to know that even the 0.25% offered for the triple access ISA is more than 0.07%."

This makes no reference to any other savings account on the market, but I did not drop "even" into that sentence for no reason. I'd consider 0.25% to be a very poor rate, even if it were an easy access account. To my knowledge there are no "worst buy" tables for savings accounts, so I can't say more than that.

The 0.07% is the short term LIBOR rate I introduced in an earlier post. I made this clear a couple of paragraphs later when I wrote: "They could lend it on the short term money markets, but 1 week LIBOR is currently at 0.07% so they'll be making a loss if they try to hang on to the money for an extra week or two vs. closing down the account and releasing themselves from the interest burden ASAP."

I'm sure nobody else is finding this discussion particularly helpful, so if you aren't either there is no point in continuing it beyond this point. I'm happy to draw a line under it if you are.

It was a suggestion based on what people had posted about the transfer times for their ISA.  Some with high credit amounts who were switching to providers using electronic transfers were finding their transfers were only just being done within 15 days or were taking slightly longer, yet others with low balances were saying their transfers went through in an acceptable time frame.  As a few reports is not enough to make a claim based on a representative sample I made it clear that what I posted was a suggestion, not a fact. 

epm-84 said:

The point about your Maths was when you ignored what I said about £90,000 going out of the building society being £90,000 going out of the building society whether it's the balance from one account or the combined balance of 9 separate accounts. You went off on a tangent about the balance being irrelevant to the amount of time needed to work on the transfer.  I knew that and tried to explain again, you claimed you did understand but then effectively wrote the same response again using different words.  As I did A Levels Maths I thought maybe I'm not explaining it in a way which you were able to understand if haven't studied Maths to an advanced level.  You then went off on a further tangent by going on about LIBORs as proof your Maths is good enough for you to explain your argument.

You chose to insult my understanding of maths because you misunderstood, either genuinely or deliberately, the point I was making. 

epm-84 said:

What seems very clear (and a number of financial journalists have picked up on) is that Nationwide did not expect so many people to transfer their ISAs out so quickly after they dropped the interest rate and that they don't have enough staff to cope with all the requests.  Perhaps they thought their members would be more loyal then they actually are or that more people would 'wait and see' rather than switching immediately.  The LIBOR may be relevant in response to whether or not Nationwide might be prioritising transfer requests based on their balances.  However, the number of transfer requests they have received relates to the interest rate Nationwide are offering in relation to other banks and building societies.  As I pointed out the difference in interest rate between Nationwide's single access 'loyalty' ISA and Virgin Money's double take ISA was minimal, now it's significant - Nationwide aren't going to get loads of transfer requests because another provider is offering 0.05% more interest for a similar product (especially when the rates on both accounts are variable) but if they are offering 0.75% more interest for a similar product they will.  

This was the example I gave:

"transferring 9 accounts with £10,000 each and delaying 1 account with £90,000 means 90% of transfers haven't been delayed, the other way around it would be 10% but with £90,000 still being transferred out of Nationwide."

Nice easy Maths £90k = 9(£10k) and 90%>10%

This was what you said after I tried to explain it a second time, after you didn't get it the first time:

"I didn't misunderstand your point. I'm stating that if 10 ISAs are to be transferred it is the statistics will be the same whether the £90k ISA is transferred first, last or in any other position. They'll have a 90% success rate upon transferring any 9 of those 10 ISAs. "

From that statement it is clear you originally either didn't read all of what I said or you didn't understand it.  To claim you understood it implies you don't understand the difference between £90k and £170k!  That's why I questioned your Maths, nothing to do with the LIBOR that you started going on about after.