It’s the last Friday of the month – payday for millions – and the day before the bank holiday weekend. If you are a planning a weeekend getaway and hold an Abbey account, formerly Abbey National, you may want to revise your plans as their systems have taken yet another case of the sniffles.
This outage, which seems to happen on an almost weekly basis, means you cannot withdraw money, use your credit/debit card or even check your balance. The money you own is not available to you nor is critical account information.
A quick google for Abbey reveals the widespread feeling that ABBEY IS THE WORST BANK in Britain:
Abbey is easily the worst bank that I have ever dealt with in 45 years
Abbey – worst bank ever?
Abbey – worst bank ever!
Abbey just a pathetic pretend bank
Britain’s worst bank accounts
Abbey’s incompetence knows no bounds and outages are the tip of the iceberg. Last year a ‘system error’ froze my account leaving me stranded in Dublin without access to funds for bus home and all the call centre advisor could recommend was that I sleep rough until the nearest branch opened again! (nearest branch is some 60 miles away in Newry if you're wondering)
This year they’ve managed to accelerate their bungling: increasing an overdraft limit on my account without consultation and following up by gifting someone in England £500 from my account, over the counter. To top it all their fraud department implied that all fault was mine!
In my experience, Abbey is well on the way to being the worst bank in the history of banking. Avoid like them like the plague they are.
3 comments:
What really leaves a bad taste in the mouth is the signifigance apportioned to Santander's takeover of Abbey by their disgruntled UK customers, who effectively state that Abbey were fine until they were taken over by 'the Spanish' - a classically British quirk if ever there was one. It's indicative of the customer base's general banking ignorance that they both failed to forsee the problems inherent in a takeover (mostly system and procedural issues) and at the same time panicked over completely fabricated ones - I need not remind you of the may calls to Abbey's Savings team from customers asking if they would be subject to Spain's tax laws and interest rates following the takeover.
Still, one can not really fault the customers for their lack of banking nous - that, after all, is what they trust their bank to do, and Abbey have blundered, misdirected and outright lied to the entire customer base for years. If there's a silver lining it's in the customer base's (necessary) increase in knowledge about their rights and restrictions vis-a-vis their own money, in the face of consistent mishandling of it by the eight biggest bank in the world.
The irony is that you and I knew Abbey were bad for years before the takeover fallout made it common public knowledge. I guess that with the right PR and a tightly run corporate communications ship, you can gloss over even the most audacious internal misdeeds. It's when people actively start looking for issues that the whole thing unravels; I often wonder if other financial institutions would withstand such scrutiny any better than Abbey would. Or perhaps they really are every inch the cancerous black hole of standards I recall in my career nightmares.
NJM
Why do you guys not change banks? I changed from the northern years ago, because they pissed me about too :)
kaz in a word, overdraft. But now that's all cleared so I'll be moving on.
Neil, I think it's an open secret that Abbey are awful at every level. But I don't think it's an active Abbey PR machine that keeps them free from mud-slinging, that's down to a general lack of interest in gripes about banking procedure, systems and shortage.
Only if the entire bank stopped working for weeks on end would the customer concerns become newsworthy.
S.
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