Customer service? The banks couldn’t care less

After sharing a joint bank account with me for 46 years, my spouse Tricia was recently contacted by NatWest demanding she report to a nearby branch with a passport or driving licence for an identity check. Failure to do so would lock her out of the joint account.

Our local NatWest outlet in South West London has been closed for the last couple of years and is now a Pilates studio. It has vanished alongside Barclays and HSBC, the last to be shuttered. Needless, to say the many local building societies have all gone too.

My wife, who is registered disabled, was presented with having to drive to Richmond town centre, where parking is atrocious, to show her papers. She made it to the branch in the nick of time, duly offered her passport, to be politely told there was a discrepancy on her date of birth which needed correcting.

Why it had remained dormant for so many decades, only to have become a problem in 2023, is an unresolved mystery.

The inconvenience of branch closures for older customers and the health challenged, not to mention sole traders still using cash, is enormous. Some 5,699 branches have been axed since 2015 and the hacking away of this vital bit of financial infrastructure carries on unabated. Just last week NatWest announced a further 36 branch closures.

Bad service: The customer, the main source of banks’ income, is ranked well behind shareholders, executives and other stakeholders in a self-serving system

Banks profiteer at our expense by taking advantage of customer inertia, by widening the gross margins they pay savers, when interest rates are rising. The customer, the main source of their income, is ranked well behind shareholders, executives and other stakeholders in a self-serving system.

Banks used to be all about customer service but over time have completely lost their way. I remember as a bright-eyed 17-year-old – heading off to university the following year – being taken by my father, a local farmer with a retail poultry business in Brighton, to meet his then National Provincial bank manager on North Street which was dominated by grand bank buildings in neo-classical style.

The branch, after a merger, subsequently became the Nat in NatWest. We were greeted like friends, ushered to the bank manager’s office where he personally set up my account and put in place arrangements for my father Michael to make a regular allowance from his personal account. We were even provided with a cup of tea and bourbon biscuit.

Our current personal dealings with NatWest, despite paying a fee of £31 a month for a Premier account, are virtually non-existent and can be mysterious and obscure. The ultimatum to my wife to provide credentials after four decades of writing cheques and having the use of joint cash and credit cards was bizarre enough.

Earlier this year, I received a direct communication, in the form of a poorly explained letter and a photocopied document, directly from Fred’s folly at Gogarburn in Edinburgh (a legacy of Fred Goodwin the disgraced former chief executive of parent Royal Bank of Scotland) asking for some forensic financial detail. At first I thought it a scam, but the letter checked out. The correspondence made it sound as if this was a security check of major importance and without it, as was the case with my wife, the joint account could be in danger.

Mostly it seemed the bank was interested in what I was doing with the family savings and the scale of them. It occurred to me that much of the information was already to hand as the bank has access to my direct debits and standing orders although there are doubtless privacy rules which prevent access: not that it has ever stopped them before.

But it occurred to me that this was no more than a harvesting exercise with the bank checking what additional services it could possibly provide. I have never quite understood but suspect a follow-up phone call from my ‘private’ banking manager, suggesting much to discuss, was not unconnected. 

The idea that NatWest has any financial services (as opposed to use of airport lounges and breakdown service) of any quality is hard to believe. It has been about cancelling, not offering, financial services. Several years passed since it apologetically returned a bundle of share certificates and other holdings as it was no longer doing stock broking services.

In the last year, the Putney branch in South West London returned to me family documents, including my Ketubah (Jewish wedding certificate) and my father’s Czech birth certificate plus a pile of insurance policies. Safe custody was no longer a service to be offered.

Unless one wants euros or dollars, forex services also appear to have been all but abolished without long wait times. Worst is the loss of a local branch, where transactions which are not possible online, can be conducted with simplicity.

Aside from anything else, online services can be unreliable. Earlier this month, I made a payment of £1,500 to a researcher, helping me on a book project, directly to his NatWest account. My online account showed the money leaving and my credit balance falling accordingly.

The payment popped into my colleague’s account, but vanished as quickly as it arrived. It took several phone calls by each of us, going through a maze of computer-activated voices before gaining access, and 24 hours to recover the funds.

Cora, the online friendly voice, was totally confused by events.

If I now want to conduct a personal transaction it means a trip to our local sub-post office tucked away behind a stationery store. It is often almost impossible to enter because of the piles of online parcels from Amazon, Boohoo, M&S and the like being returned to sender.

As for the ATM at the post office, it is the last free machine standing on our high street –meaning queues – other than a limited service and cash facility outside Tesco Express.

Banks are an absentee from local commerce amid an overdose of coffee shops, exercise studios and hairdressing salons. The superglue which once held the nation’s city and suburban centres together – the local ‘Big Four’ bank – has become that most endangered species.

There is plenty of opportunity for retail challenger Metro Bank or Sweden’s excellent Handelsbanken there for the taking now that NatWest has abrogated its community responsibility.