NatWest

It's clear NatWest concentrate most of their training on the people in their branches who have to deal with customers face to face. Unfortunately the incompetence of the back end of the bank leaves these people with more irate customers to deal with.

It makes it hard to get upset with the person you're dealing withwhen they are trying to be helpful but the rest of the bank they represent is making a mess.

In a 6 month period i had two major bad experiences which i'll detail here:
Firstly about two hundred pounds went missing from my account when a foreign transaction by another customer had been miskeyed into my account. I firmly accept it was an accident and mistakes happen, but what got me about this was it took two days to sort out and i was made to feel in the wrong patronised: "are you sure you didn't withdraw $300US?", "are you absolutely sure?". You'd think i'd remember if i was about to make a trip across the Atlantic.

My second problem was far more severe. A cheque had been removed from a new chequebook before it arrived with me, and was cashed for almost a #1000, again, these things happen. But, the cheque put my account into a #900 UNAUTHORISED overdraft without so much as a question by the bank. I did receive a letter saying my account was in the overdraft and i should contact them, but basically they processed the cheque like normal. I immediately went to the branch and questioned why my account was so overdrawn, and again they asked "am i sure i don't remember writing out a cheque for that much". I guess for some people may be they don't remember, but i'm sure i would.

Anyhow we worked out it was a cheque that had been cashed, and even found the cheque number, which strangely enough being completely out of sequence and about 50 ahead of the last cheque i'd used didn't trigger anything either.

Still, the rep did point out that the money had been taken out of my account but hadn't been paid out at the other end yet, and as it was before noon we could get an emergency stop on the cheque, as it was about 11:30. The rep then called the cheque clearing house but was passed from pillar to lamppost beore finding out the person they needed wasn't available or out to lunch and got someone else who said they would see what they could do. Which was basically nothing! Personally i believe the person at the clearing house just couldn't be bothered or at least that's what it seemed like. Maybe because they'd have to admit they allowed a large cheque to go through without MY signature.

So they missed three major flags that should have alerted them to a problem (cheque amount/account availabilty, cheque number (not a biggie but combined with the other two) and signature)

So to remedy the whole mess i eventually had to file two police reports, one for theft in mail and one for cheque fraud before Natwest would give me my money back. This took the best part of a week to release my account. In the mean time I had no access to money in my account to pay bills or buy groceries. So I had to resort to scrounging loans from friends and family.

My experience is probably not representative of every customer, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and show what can happen. I have also had a Lloyds TSB account for far longer (although i wasn't actively using it at the time) and have never suffered any similar bad experiences, maybe because things haven't gone wrong, but maybe their backend organisation is that bit better so things don't go wrong.