Post Office Instant Saver-appallling & Risky Service

mikegahan

Dear Friends
I recently opened a Post office instant saver lured by the good rates and easy access. First impressions were good and on 6 June I went to my local Post office and deposited a cheque for transmission to them. The clerk scanned it in front of me and also gave me a printed receipt. The money was credited to my account. On Saturday I phoned up and requested transfer of a large amount to my linked account - no problem. Today as it had not arrived into my linked account I phoned up and they had no record of my call to take money out. Lame excuse was that they had several call centres. Worried, i then asked if the transfer could go through now. They replied "no the cheque was only scanned in on 16 June". But I had a PO receipt dated 6 June, plus my bank confirmed that the cheque had been CASHED by the Post office on 11 June! As i said i have never experienced anything like this ever, and I am now seriously worried and trying to close this account before my money disappears. This service is hosted by the bank of Ireland who had a good reputation. Avoid this one like the plague!

mikegahan

Further to my posting yesterday, a lady phoned me to apologise. She admitted that
(1) No record had been made on my computer file of my original request to take money out.
(2) Because of a problem in uploading data between the Post office branches and Bank of Ireland (who run the account) my cheque deposit was logged as having taken place 10 days after the actual date! This is why they wrongly said the cheque had not cleared. They promise to pay me the interest owing and i asked for some ex gratia payment, £20 or £30. I could pursue it for more but life is too short.

Would you trust a bank like this with your money?

Hungerdunger

mikegahan wrote: »

Would you trust a bank like this with your money?

Well, you've obviously had a bad experience, but then others have also had bad experiences with other banks and building societies. For example Barclays have experienced severe delays in the processing of this year's ISA even though they promised last year they would have enough resources to deal with it after a similar fiasco last year. There have been reports of people who applied to open an ISA in the 2007-8 tax year having it opened for the 2008-9 year, resulting in them losing a year's entitlement to ISAs.

I'm still trying to sort out why it has taken Nationwide over two months to fail to transfer an ISA from the Principality BS. At one point they told me it was because they had not received a cheque from the Principality, and it was only after I'd spent a load of time talking to the Principality that they agreed they had received the cheque after all about 6 weeks ago!

I think that if you read through this forum you'll see there are many other instances of banks behaving badly, but whether you choose to stay with the PO is up to you.

mikegahan

Thanks, Hungerdunger. In the end i got my money out of PO instant saver. The main thing about banks is that they are reliable; two serious errors in the first month of memembership qualifies as seriously unreliable. A bank that does not record a request to transfer £kK is to be avoided.

As regards your problems with the Nationwide I read elsewhere in the forum that Nationwide has a serious backlog of work due to the merger with Portman and consolidation of networks, accounts etc