What's happened to HSBC?

Booge

Hi All, 

I applied for a mortgage with HSBC back in April 2021 and I got an offer back the day after I uploaded my payslips, based on an online valuation. Was very impressed with the speed of the service. Unfortunately I then had massive issues with the upper chain and court of protection/ probate issues involved. So my mortgage expired after 6 months. The transaction is now looking like it's finally ready to proceed, so I applied again. 

This time I'm doing exactly the same process, same mortgage but huge technical problems applying. To start with I was told I have to phone their customer service line to get my £999 booking fee back from the offer that expired, and that I can't transfer it to the new mortgage (I have to pay again, then get a refund). So I tried phoning that line and was put on hold for 2 hours. Yes, I actually put it on hold for 2 hours and it still wasn't answered so I gave up. 

Then I'm trying to pay the booking fee for the new mortgage and the system doesn't work. I authorised the payment via my bank and then after my Santander bank page tells me that the payment has been succesfully authorised, HSBC's page doesn't actually take the payment. It then throws me out to a page that says "you need to log on using your mortgage security details to view the application", even though I've just logged on to the system to get to that point. I've checked my Santander app and the payment never leaves my account. So I log on again as requested, and it just gets me back to the same point that I was at before I tried to make the payment. I've tried this several times, on different days and it never works. 

So now it looks like I just can't do business with HSBC - you can't get through on the phone and the website doesn't work. 

The only thing I can think of is yesterday the monetary policy committee was due to make its decision on interest rates and they might have gone up (though they actually didn't in the end) so did HSBC deliberately stop everything from working so that nobody could book mortgages until they had reviewed their interest rates? If so, why not just say that instead of making it impossible to do anything? Such a waste of my time. I've submitted a complaint now and am hoping someone can tell me how I'm supposed to proceed. 

Has anyone else been having these problems?

Jonathan

jst1986

I've had to wait 45+ minutes on their helpline fairly frequently, plenty of complaints on Twitter for two hour waits.

When I last spoke to them about my application last Thursday they said I'd have a decision early this week but it's now 8 days later and no updates on the online portal.