Thursday, June 14, 2007

NatWest fail again

The latest Nat West blunder is with a new debit card. They sent out the card and gave me the option of activating the card online, which I did. They did not send out a new PIN for the card, instead they said that the PIN I had with the previous card would work with the new one, but it does not. What a surprise.

After a conversation with a bank CSR (which they charge for. nice.) it seems that they just don't know what went wrong. Furthermore, they don't care. They just want to have me wait another 6 working days, which will be about 2 weeks, for their process to work it's way through.

Contrast this with the bank I was with in Australia who could fix a PIN problem in just a few minutes at a branch, and with American Express who can have a completely new working card in my hands within 24 hours.

So why stay with Nat West? Because banking in the UK is set up such that the pain of moving from one bank to another is enormous. The banks love this and do all they can to maintain this customer-hostile status quo.

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