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Opening a bank account
Jun. 2nd, 2023 05:47 pmHaving moved house, and with the associated shake-up in finances, I am now bringing my spending to some order and that includes opening another account. I decided to try Barclays, not having banked with them previously as, back in Dundee when I was last reorganizing accounts, at that time they had no local branch. Here, they have a branch near us.
First impressions are more entertaining than encouraging. Making the appointment to open the account took three telephone calls, each with tedium of automated menu systems and voice recognition that starts out with no idea of what I am saying. As R. doesn't have a year's UK address history, the website doesn't allow starting an online application but the call centre staff appear not to know this. I eventually reached somebody who explained that the software needs fixing and they have mentioned this many times but nobody cares to actually fix it.
Anyhow, I made an appointment for one day at one branch then received a call asking to move it to a different day at a different branch, which was fine. When we turned up, the front door was broken, we had to go around to the back of the block, up plenty of stairs, then were led through the interior down past the front door and into a meeting room. The person whom our appointment was with was not available, we had a perfectly adequate and apologetic substitute, who ran into various computer issues, including having to take a break upstairs for reboots and relogins and suchlike. Then, they got to deal with a strange error being thrown by their Android application. I also got to surprise them by being their first to answer
We do now have an account open and I am most curious to see if the road ahead includes more glitches.
Update: On going through the paperwork afterward, I noticed that the member of bank staff who had opened our account had handwritten our resulting account number for us with one digit wrong.
First impressions are more entertaining than encouraging. Making the appointment to open the account took three telephone calls, each with tedium of automated menu systems and voice recognition that starts out with no idea of what I am saying. As R. doesn't have a year's UK address history, the website doesn't allow starting an online application but the call centre staff appear not to know this. I eventually reached somebody who explained that the software needs fixing and they have mentioned this many times but nobody cares to actually fix it.
Anyhow, I made an appointment for one day at one branch then received a call asking to move it to a different day at a different branch, which was fine. When we turned up, the front door was broken, we had to go around to the back of the block, up plenty of stairs, then were led through the interior down past the front door and into a meeting room. The person whom our appointment was with was not available, we had a perfectly adequate and apologetic substitute, who ran into various computer issues, including having to take a break upstairs for reboots and relogins and suchlike. Then, they got to deal with a strange error being thrown by their Android application. I also got to surprise them by being their first to answer
yesto if I am a US citizen.
We do now have an account open and I am most curious to see if the road ahead includes more glitches.
Update: On going through the paperwork afterward, I noticed that the member of bank staff who had opened our account had handwritten our resulting account number for us with one digit wrong.
