New Bank Account - Co-op, Virgin Money, or something else?

Finance_Fool

After having had a pretty appalling experience with Barclays over several years, my charity is looking to switch. After extensive research about what might be appropriate for our needs, it seems to have come down to Co-op or Virgin... when looking at their own websites and associated blurb. Both, however, seem to have appalling customer service reviews. 

Are there any charities out there that have had positive experiences with banks, as they all seem to be pretty dire at the moment!?

Thanks

Savvy_Sue

The 3 I suggest are Unity Trust, Triodos, and CAF. They are not High Street banks, but they'll all have arrangements of some kind for paying in and withdrawing cash, if you need those facilities. 

Time4T_Accounts

Hi. We are in a similar position - feeling rather bruised by Barclays’ treatment.  We’ve come down to a choice of Metro or Co-op, and we’re going to try out the latter alongside Barclays before making the final switching decision. We’re £260k income, 8 employees.

Finance_Fool

Savvy_Sue said:

The 3 I suggest are Unity Trust, Triodos, and CAF. They are not High Street banks, but they'll all have arrangements of some kind for paying in and withdrawing cash, if you need those facilities. 

Thanks - I haven't looked at Unity Trust, but Triodos and CAF weren't appropriate for some reason or another that I can't recall. I think Triodos maybe aren't accepting new ones, but I really can't remember with CAF. 

Steve_PL_too said:

Hi. We are in a similar position - feeling rather bruised by Barclays’ treatment.  We’ve come down to a choice of Metro or Co-op, and we’re going to try out the latter alongside Barclays before making the final switching decision. We’re £260k income, 8 employees.

We're similar - I think we'll go with Co-op too. Apparently their processes are a bit awkward, but they aren't utterly ridiculous, nonsensical and obstructive like Barclays have been. 

Time4T_Accounts

Barclays have just asked us for the exact nature and origin of money from our local health board (as part of, apparently, know your customer). Given that we are a registered charity, in receipt of funds frequently from the NHS (social prescribing), they seem to have an incredibly short memory! 

Finance_Fool

This is the sort of thing that happens to us all the time with Barclays. We had a similar incredible repeated memory loss of who we were, the nature of our business, where we got our money from and the identity of the two people who have access to the bank account, which kept resulting in the removal of access meaning we were utterly powerless to pay our bills, etc. Part of the issue is that they kept telling us that they had removed old trustees from the mandate as we instructed them to, but they hadn't. Barclays would then sporadically realise that they hadn't been removed, blame us for not doing our admin properly and block our account. This went on, on and off, for four years.  

Another time, I visited a branch to have my ID (photo, address, signature, the whole kit and caboodle) verified by a Barclays employee, which they then wouldn't accept as genuine and refused to add me to the mandate. Then, we had our access blocked and they told us to sort out the mandate (yet again) but we couldn't because they wouldn't talk to anyone. Then they sent us a form... which we filled out and returned, never to be seen again... it was the wrong form. Not that anyone bothered getting in touch to tell us, obviously it was just filed in the bin.  

The final straw was when our CEO spent two full days on the phone a couple of months ago being batted between the mandate team and the IT team to try to restore access, for the umpteenth time, with each department claiming it was the other's fault. 

There's more, but I'm going to stop there because I can feel my blood pressure rising!

Time4T_Accounts

Pretty much everything you’ve written there, F_F, chimes with our experience.  In our case it’s been one of our trustees who’s spent hours and hours on the phone trying to sort out mandates.  And, yes, they’ve asked for full details and verification of long-former trustees who they’ve been told repeatedly are no longer so.  So frustrating.

Savvy_Sue

I'm sure it's no comfort, but DH is in a similar struggle with NatWest

Time4T_Accounts

I spent my working life as the in-house accountant in firms of solicitors : banks were most definitely not my favourite institutions!