I’ll keep this brief as I don’t want to spend any more time on Abbey than I need to but if you are considering switching to them because of their free business banking service my recommendation is that you:
DO NOT USE ABBEY BUSINESS BANKING SERVICES
it’s like a death by paper-cuts; many small and irritating things will start to happen, bleeding you dry.
It’s a half-assed implementation of a business banking service; quite obviously a trial that has gone wrong. Their business banking laughably referred to as ‘online banking’ is a good example of this. It WILL go down regularly and you WILL be unable to do online transactions. You will also get fobbed off with lame ‘technical’ reasons for this happening that put the blame back onto you and your ‘firewall’ which after application of even rudimentary networking theory turns out to be utter bollocks.
One day we had enough and went to the HSBC in the village and asked them to become our bank. “No problem” we got a visa debit card with a 30 day credit option, like a mini overdraft which is great and we get to walk over the road to pay cheques in now. They, like all other banks offer a switcher service so all DD’s and standing orders are copied over. So we sign a letter telling Abbey to let HSBC discuss our account then left HSBC to get on with it.
Some time elapses
It’s our quarter end so this Sunday we went online to pay ourselves a 3 month dividend plus to sanity check that cashflow was not lying and that there was indeed enough money get a chq raised for the VAT man; all basic, basic stuff for a small business.
Going online didn’t work, we rang up of course they are not there, so we waited a day. Then we rang up again and got an IP address to access the service (after side stepping a number of ‘have you checked your firewall’ type questions) so it now works. When we got to the account listing page our main account is *gone* an we’re left with the reserve account that has about 20p in. After a small panic we came to the conclusion that Abbey had probably totally screwed up and closed our account early - see how they’ve managed our expectations so well that we expect the worse.
No problem, screw Abbey we can use our new bank to pay us and Mr VAT man. Umm, no, actually there’s only the money that we’ve been paying in over the past few weeks from cheque payments, nowhere near enough, where’s our money gone?
Turns out that Abbey closed out account -even though told not to - and then SENT A CHEQUE to HSBC
which took 4 days to get there and we’ll now have to wait a further 5 days, actually 7 because of the weekend, to get our money. As a nice addition they also neglected to send the details of each payee with the DD’s and Standing orders so, whilst we so helpfully have the names, we have to ring back up our suppliers and get the bank details to get everything set up manually again.
Deep breath
Luckily for us all our suppliers and been paid this month and the wages had already been paid so it’s turned out to be an inconvenience only, but it could have been much worse.
It’s also worth pointing out that I know the other banks have many horror stories and are by no means perfect but I simply can’t believe that they could do a worse job than Abbey.
That gentle reminder :
DO NOT USE ABBEY BUSINESS BANKING SERVICES
Here’s a few more satisfied customers like us at Siftware:
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