I have a Natwest account and after the fiasco recently where I got paid 4 days late, I decided to open a new main account at HSBC, but keep NW as a back up. Now it turns out HSBC are a bunch of money-launderers doing dodgy stuff with Gringos.
I have a natwest account for years but only use it as a back up now as I've been unhappy with their services / charges for years and guess i'm to busy / lazy to change it. I prefer farmyard banking as I call it, so I went to Alliance and leicester. But obviously they got swallowed up by santander
the coop has been mine for 7 years ,when they cock it they give me a tenner and have dealt with everything i needed now with there link up with britania no more post office quese for paying in great and you get dividend on loans cc transactions etc about 200 a year in my case
I left Santander to go to NatWest, never had a problem when their computers went down but that was mainly because I didn't touch my money that week. Never going back with Santander, their customer services are appalling! I once cancelled a standing order but set it back up the following day (years ago when I got paid weekly - in order to pay my rent). Anyway, they cocked up by leaving both standing orders live and when the first one bounced tried to argue that I intended for 2 identical standing orders on 2 days and therefore I wasn't getting my charges back.. Oh, and when Virgin media lost a CD containing thousands of customers personal data on it (including mine) and I reported it to Santander, they quickly put a fraud block against me which killed any credit I could apply for (including a mobile phone contract).. Really shockingly bad service from them. So far no real issues with Natwest.
Co-op to buy 632 Lloyds bank branches I'm not a customer but I've good things about Co-op bank over the years. I hope that they can continue with this huge expansion
Hard to absorb all those new employee's and then get them to adopt your own long established culture, I would hope they could do it too, at least the Co-op will be more like the old TSB, don't know how many old TSB employee's are still around though. All those IT systems they have just inherited by the way, were pretty crap compared to the real time systems the TSB used to run but which Lloyds binned in favour of their old fashioned batch based processing, the TSB was quite advanced back in the mid 1990's.
