Opening a bank account

[mtbc]

Having 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 yes to 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.

Comments

[maju]

Doesn't sound very confidence-inspiring.

[dewline]

This seems worrying.

[wildeabandon]

We use Barclays for our church bank account, and I have not had good experiences with them, I'm afraid. They're fine for the actual day to day banking, but whenever you want to change anything (e.g. add or remove people's access to the account, process a change of name because someone got married, change the rules about what transactions need what sort of approvals) it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare.

For a personal account you'll presumably need to do a lot less of that sort of thing than a charity account, so it might not be an issue, but consider yourself warned...

[thewayne]

And here I thought European banking was vastly superior to American banking! ;-)

Obviously a case of YMMV and there's crappy software everywhere. And boy, can I talk about crappy software with the local bank that my wife uses!

[mtbc]

Local banks in particular often seem to have crappy software! (Though I found the Y-12 credit union to be an exception.) And one doesn't typically get to try the online banking before opening an account. At ORNL credit union I'd have to remind the tellers of the fee structure for my account because their computer didn't know it.

[fred_mouse]

Oh, goodness. I've had that kind of runaround trying to close a bank account, but never opening one. To be fair though, I haven't opened one since I opened Youngest's school banking account, in about 2010, and they do so many of those that one could just turn up at the bank and everyone knew what was required.