5 star service! (barclays.co.uk)

Member Name: Welshlad

Product:	barclays.co.uk
Date:	03/12/00 (480 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Secure bank management

Disadvantages: lack of instructions?

I have to admit I only really opened my Barclays account for one reason, =and that was the fact they will cash foreign cheques for free, and apply no surcharge, a very rare offer, and this certainly gained them my custom! When you consider the likes of the Halifax charge £10 or more, and most other high street banks charge the same sort of fee, you can see why this is such a good offer!
After creating my account, I was then offered the opportunity to use their on-line banking service. While I have no worries about the safety issues of online banking, I thought why bother if I wasn’t going to use my account that much, but the temptation of a £5 Amazon.co.uk gift certificate swayed my judgement, and I dully agreed.
After about 4 weeks, I received my details through the post, with my account name and password arriving separately for security reasons (very sensible). Once they were back, I logged onto the ibank site, and was promptly able to access my account, everything went smoothly and I had very little hassle. However, I consider myself to be quite computer literate, and this proved no problem, but for those who are not so comfortable with using a PC and the Internet, the lack of instructions may cause a few problems – what support is available for this I am not able to say.
After a few minutes of digging, I began to discover what a very well designed and incredibly useful service this was, and I was pleased that I opted for the Home banking option.
In almost an instant, you can access the incredibly well designed site, view virtually anything you like about your account, transfer money between as many sources/accounts as you have, pay bills and much much more at the click of a mouse. All this is stress free, and MUCH easier than trawling through town, and cuing at the bank for half an hour on a Saturday morning!
With this at my disposal, I found myself quickly using my Barclays account more and more, and is now the primary account I
have – something I never expected when I joined!
As for the security issues, I have no qualms about using them, and think the whole issue of Internet security is vastly over-hyped, as people consider it safer to give their account details un-encrypted to a human over the phone (who they have never met, and could easily copy those details themselves, not to mention the fact that anyone with £100 worth of electronics kit could quite easily listen in on your call!), rather than encrypt them to an almost unbreakable format and transmit them in packets (small chunks of data sent via many different routes, meaning they would have to intercept 1000’s of packets to get your details, as opposed to one!) to a secure computer. This, to me, makes no sense, and while I feel the Internet does have its dangers, if you use it sensibly (i.e. don’t access it from a public computer (e.g. library, Internet café, college etc.) then your problems will be minimal to non-existent.

I have been very happy with the service received so far, and find it a very useful financial management tool that really has no bad points I can mention of any significance. If you are looking or a new easy to manage bank account, make sure you giver this some consideration.

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