Alliance and Leicester

Bazza73

Hi all,

Will start of good - generally no problems with A&L.

However, tried to make a payment from my A&L current account to pay a bill of £460+ on Friday before Mayday bank holidays. Went through all the steps to set it up as a one-off, entered sort / account numbers etc... Set the date for that day and was informed it would be paid on that date. All seems fine! Money left the account straight away. Great I thought! Given the bank holiday weekend, I left it until Tuesday to contact the supplier I sent the money to. They hadn't received it! Called A&L to see why.

While A&L are signed up to the faster payments service and can fully accept in-bound transfers of £10k at a time, they have an OUT-BOUND POLICY LIMITING YOU TO £250 per transfer. Any amount over this value, and they transfer it via BACS instead of the faster payments method. NOTHING on their website at the time of creating the payment tells you about this. The customer service person I spoke with said it was listed under the security section in help - here is what it states "To start with we will have lower limits. These limits may change at any time without us telling you first." (just do a search for faster payments on their help screen).

I then asked if they could cancel the payment. No! it had already left and was in the bacs systems somewhere. Nothing more they could do. Here's an idea - post a message on the payments screen to tell people that the payment is going via 4 day bacs or post the limit somewhere! Had a limit of been displayed, I would have made 2 smaller payments. Can't stress enough how important it was to have made the payment on the Friday before the holidays.

Whats the point of this limit? Who set it so low? When will it be lifted?:mad:

New account anyone???

emc

There are benefits to having an account with Alliance and Leicester in the first year, but after that, there is nothing to compensate for the appalling on-line banking system and even worse branch customer service from A&L, which ranks with Nationwide and fellow Santander subsidiary Abbey as the worst for branch level service.

I would echo what others have said about the incomplete implementation of faster payments, and the inaccurate and partial posting of transactions, which makes it impossible to work out the current status of the account. I like to extract the transactions to work on them outside the A&L online system, which has a time-out period that is far too short, but then find that checking the extracted transaction was a waste of time, because the transactions are later changed and resequenced.

As to branch level service, the staff in my local branch do not want to do anything for customers. They tell customers to use the in-branch cash deposit machine or the ATM instead of using the counter service, and to use the in-branch telephone to make any enquiries and resolve any issues rather than ask the staff to do anything. That may almost be reasonable, except that the ATM is usually not working, or does not have any paper for receipts, or does not have any envelopes for depositing cheques.

An example of branch staff service is when I made a withdrawal of £20 from my A&L current account using the in-branch ATM, received a £20 note, and asked the counter staff to split the £20 into two £10 notes. They were not keen, and asked whether I was a customer. I gave them my A&L card, and they then said they had to pay the £20 into my account, and then withdraw the £20 again in order to give me two £10 notes, presumably as punishment for daring to ask them to do something. I said that that was silly, as I had only just withdrawn the £20 from my account, and any other place would simply change the money without carrying out two pointless transactions. They insisted, so I handed over the £20, which they paid in. But to make the withdrawal, they demanded I go through security, give my id and date of birth! I said this is even more stupid, as I was the same person that gave them the £20 to deposit a minute ago, but they insisted and insisted ...

The next day, I opened a current account elsewhere and moved my funds from A&L, and over the week just gone I transferred all my payees, standing orders and direct debits to the new account.

I am no longer an Alliance & Leicester customer!

masonic

Surfer wrote: »

Totally disagree as it also looks as if you may not have sufficient funds to meet all your DDs the following day causing unncessary concern.

It shouldn't cause unneccesary concern as if you go to the page listing your DDs you'll see the last payment date is set to the next working day, showing that they've already been processed for that month.

acc

emc wrote: »

An example of branch staff service is when I made a withdrawal of £20 from my A&L current account using the in-branch ATM, received a £20 note, and asked the counter staff to split the £20 into two £10 notes. They were not keen, and asked whether I was a customer. I gave them my A&L card, and they then said they had to pay the £20 into my account, and then withdraw the £20 again in order to give me two £10 notes, presumably as punishment for daring to ask them to do something. I said that that was silly, as I had only just withdrawn the £20 from my account, and any other place would simply change the money without carrying out two pointless transactions. They insisted, so I handed over the £20, which they paid in. But to make the withdrawal, they demanded I go through security, give my id and date of birth! I said this is even more stupid, as I was the same person that gave them the £20 to deposit a minute ago, but they insisted and insisted ...

The next day, I opened a current account elsewhere and moved my funds from A&L, and over the week just gone I transferred all my payees, standing orders and direct debits to the new account.

Sorry, emc. I'm with Alliance & Leicester on this one.

You have obviously not heard of the international criminal gang that has people skulking in A&L branches, waiting for some person to deposit a £20 note in order to withdraw 2 £10 notes, just so that they can kidnap that person between the two transactions, and, this is the complicated bit so try and keep up, substitute one of their own members to withdraw the 2 £10 notes, and bingo, they have swindled A&L out of £20.

This must be happening on a grand scale, and is understandably causing A&L grave concern, so they have to impose maximum security on the withdrawal.

bishop_stoke

Well, Ive finally had enough of Alliance & Leicester and their little tricks....let me explain:

Ive banked with them since August 2005. My salary went direct to the account (Premier Direct), every four weeks. It wasnt long before I realized that 'cash' paid in over the counter didnt appear on my account balance as rapidly as one imagined. This led to one or two confrontations, after being chinged up by them for "Payment Review Fee's" and such like. In the early days, an email 'snotogram' usually saw the fee's rapidly reimbursed.

However, the last 6 months or so have seen them take a particularly hard line. I knew a couple of months ago that I was going to exceed my overdraft limit. No worries I thought, ive been a sensible customer they'll agree to a very temporary increase. Err...wrong. They declined it. Knowing what was going out, they then charged me £25.00 per transaction, then failed to pay a direct debit for £22.00. They charged me another £25.00 for not paying that. I phoned them up to tell them that I really was in temporary trouble, and I could not only sort it out, but pay off my overdraft completely on 1st May. Nope - not listening...."the computer says no" and all that.

So, ive slung them in, paid off my overdraft in full and am now taking the same sort of line with them as they took against me. The final straw was last Thursday. They returned an electronic money transfer from PayPal to cover my Tiscali (dont even get me going with those 'chimps')phone bill, then charged me another £25.00 Payment Review Fee. £380.00 in the last 7 months these thieving monkies have liberated from my account (at least !!!!!! Turpin wore a mask), and Ive just stopped their gravy train.

So, here we go - Alliance & Leicester are firmly in my sights.

bishop_stoke

acc wrote: »

Sorry, emc. I'm with Alliance & Leicester on this one.

You have obviously not heard of the international criminal gang that has people skulking in A&L branches, waiting for some person to deposit a £20 note in order to withdraw 2 £10 notes,

I have - They usually sit behind the counter cunningly disguised as employees.....;)

jadex

emc wrote: »

There are benefits to having an account with Alliance and Leicester in the first year, but after that, there is nothing to compensate for the appalling on-line banking system and even worse branch customer service from A&L, which ranks with Nationwide and fellow Santander subsidiary Abbey as the worst for branch level service.

50p per day for overdraft with monthly cap at £5 is quite beneficial to me

Dinah93

Afraid I found A & L absolutely appauling and am currently in the process of an ombudsman investigation because of their incompetance. I'm sick of writing about all their mistakes but I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy.

Surfer

Dinah93 wrote: »

Afraid I found A & L absolutely appauling and am currently in the process of an ombudsman investigation because of their incompetance. I'm sick of writing about all their mistakes but I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy.

I think the word "incompetence" grossly understates their performance. No wonder they were taken over by Santander.

MarkyMarkD

I happily banked with A&L for over 10 years. They are not as bad as some people make out, but I think some people have different expectations than I do.

If you are willing to understand how things work - like the extra day's clearing time, like the way online banking works and what all the balances mean - then their service is not bad. I don't understand why everyone has issues with their call centre staff for example - maybe it's the attitude of those calling and the fact you are asking for things which they are not permitted to give.

For example, if you attitude is that you've been wrongly charged, whereas in fact it's your misunderstanding of when you have to fund your account prior to undertaking a payment transaction, I can see why they are resilient and you feel that they are bad.

The only reason I do not use A&L as my primary bank account now is that I have a Barclays/Woolwich offset mortgage; I still have my A&L account and use it for many transactions - and thereby get free travel insurance. I'm still happy with what they do for me, apart from the ludicrous and not clearly disclosed £250 FP limit.