Another Fine Mess You’ve Got Us Into (Yorkshire Bank)

Member Name: Festa

Product:	Yorkshire Bank
Date:	06/11/01 (631 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Local branches

Disadvantages: Poor customer service, Take a long time to sort out problems, They take the money first and then ask questions

After my mother had her bankcards stolen when she was on a recent holiday to Majorca, I have been forced to enforce my opinion about Yorkshire Bank. I always thought that they were a small bank that offered good service to their customers. After all many of their customers have been with their ‘local’ bank for many years. I however have had encountered difficulties with them.

Whereas Barclays have excelled with their fraud policy, Yorkshire Bank seems to have done just the reverse.

First of all they added an hour onto the time that they received the phone call notifying them of the theft of the card (I made the call before I went to work so I know exactly what time the call was made!).

On my mum’s return to the country she called the bank and confirmed them that she had not used the cards during her stay in Majorca. Whereas Barclays could tell her immediately exactly when and where the cards were used, she was told that if there had been any use it would appear on her statement.

Friday morning the statement arrived and we found her account has been cleared. A further phone call to the bank informed my mum that it would be about a month before she could have details of the transactions. In the meantime, an OAP with limited funds has had £600+ deducted from her account with no details of the transactions.

How is it that one bank can pick up the card has been stolen before you realise it is missing and yet another can’t tell you details until 5 weeks afterwards.

Summary
1.Staff are not as efficient as competitors and keep you hanging on for a long time before they inform you that you will have to wait a month to find out.
2. You are left penniless while they try and trace the transactions.
3. They can’t even tell the time!

UPDATE
Having read a comment suggesting that I personally have never used the bank, I will expand my opinion further.

As a guide lea
der our company held a Yorkshire Bank Account until four years ago. In the end we withdrew our funds due to problems with the account. Please remember that this was a charity account.

I paid into the account £45 of which £15 was a cheque. When I received the bank statement two months later (since the statements were only sent out quarterly) I discovered that the account was overdrawn by £25. With this statement I also received a notification of charges of £36 which would be deducted from our account. The problem was due to the fact that the bank had credited our account with only the cheque amount.

Three weeks later I managed to resolve the situation - due to the fact that the bank manager himself sorted it out personally and located the transaction in question. Why did he take it upon himself to sort it out personally the day after I spoke to him? Well I banked at his branch on a daily basis and had threatened that not only would our firm change banks - but also he would lose all of his referrals that we made to our clients. After this I closed the account and also closed my personal savings account.

Summary: