Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Last Bank closure in Dartmouth

Just after completing my apprenticeship I was told that I must have my salary paid into a bank. I did not have a bank account. I got one and found that I had to pay to get my own money out. I kicked up a stink. It looks like we could be heading back to that situation. I will always use cash for moderate purchases to keep the usage up. Of course most of us on here are financially comfortable. Having in the past being unemployed for 9 months with two young sons to look after on my own with a £600 a month mortgage to service I appreciate the plight of the "poor" who may be do not have a bank account and the loss of a few pounds can be very serious.

On getting my first job I opened an account with Barclays which is have retained ever since. It is the central Basingrad branch and it is still open. It is now down to one till for business and personal use. The rest of the bank is all about chargeable services, mortgage loans etc.

Quite a while back we were moving and I wanted an offset mortgage which Barclays did not offer. I moved to First Direct as they had top awards for customer service, the correct mortgage product and great Internet Banking capability.

Without realising it I had moved to a bank with a deliberate zero highstreet footprint. They do have an arrangement with HSBC for meetings but the rest has been done by telephone and internet since 1998.

If I compare this with the farce I have had with Barclays in the last year trying to move some money in the US and UK plus the deeply frustrating token/calculator they make me use. First Direct wins hands down as it is setup for personal banking.

At one point using Barclays Internet banking I was directed to call telephone banking. They then said I had to go into a branch. On arriving at the branch I was told I did not have an appointment and would not be seen as they were fully booked (no offer to hover and see if someone failed to turn up). Then finally on meeting the personal banker he said I could have done it online and I had to show him I could not. This is a largish branch not a local branch.

It does make me laugh that the post office counter scheme is now run through Bank of Ireland. If they were smart they would offer a chargable counter service for other banks cheques/cash and turn a profit on it given they were in a monopoly position. Not that we need yet another stealth tax on our businesses.

It's good to hear that Tim and Peter are happy with the service from their banks and that Alistair has had good service with the new breed with First Direct.

We were similarly disillusioned with Barclays which is my MIL's bank, we had sorted out Legal POA and just went along to the branch (after setting up a very structured lime slot) to sort a couple of things out. What they could get wrong they did get wrong unbelievable incompetence it really was, after four corrections and two months later it worked but what a trial.

Either to cheque sign and register me with a debit card and internet banking on her behalf, fairly straightforward we thought.

Interestingly there are small banks in the market including one that is trying a branch based model - Metro. They are all finding life very difficult. With low wholesale interest rates and customers not willing to pay for a service, running branches with all the costs that involves isn't really viable.

The only complaint I have with any of the banks I use is the amount of legalistic bumph that the FRC force them to send out to me. Often 20 pages at a time - does anyone ever read that rubbish?

I hadn't heard of Metro I wish them well there certainly seems to be a void in the market right now.

I've never read a full set of it right through I'm afraid, lifes too short isn't it.

My nephew works for Metro Bank and they seem to be turning banking on its head but unfortunately don’t seem to have progressed further north than about Cambridge or so.

We got so fed up with the banks we have used for decades that we decided to move our business and personal accounts. Although we haven’t got a local branch we moved a couple of our businesses over to Santander. We were advised to go to the Chester branch based at the university where they have just 3 members of staff. One day I messed up and was transferring some money from a personal account to our business account and as it was a new payment due to changing banks inadvertently got a couple of numbers wrong and sent the payment to somebody else which I didn’t discover for 3 weeks. When I contacted Natwest, who we banked with, they said there was a process which would take up to 28 days to recover our money - it was £600! At the end of it they said they had been in touch through the inter bank process to recover the money and the person who I sent it to hadn’t responded and therefore my money was lost. Best advice was to speak with the CAB. I spoke to them and they couldn’t understand why I was advised to speak with them. Rang up our small Santander branch and told them the problem. In 2 hours the money was back in our account. The person I had sent the money to had contacted Santander on the day I sent it to say they knew nothing about the money they had received and it was frozen awaiting to be claimed by me. That’s what personal service is all about.

That's a heartening story Roger, 10 points to Santander and 0 to Natwest.

I had a little dig around on the net and Metro seem to have acquired quite a lot of branches since 2010 I wish them luck.

The rest of the old cartel have shown themselves up for what they are greedy avaricious barstewards and we are paying over a grand each in taxes for their mistakes .

Indeed. Although what we really need is more ‘Bank of Dave’ type branches which believe in old fashioned values of what will work in the local community rather than on a pan Europeon scale.

My goodness! Sounds just as bad as Italy (or America). I don't understand why efforts never seem to be made to recover at least some money from those responsible. Even when they get dismissed they go home with a golden parachute

Yes. You wish it might be real instead of metaphorical and then land on them as they get home. Little squishy moment as a message to others.