Currently bank with RBS. Outwith the national “scandal” they’ve been quite good as a personal banking experience for the last 25yrs – but then again I do everything online and don’t make a habit of going overdrawn so I’m not sure how hard they would have to try to be bad…

Anyway, RBS are going to be selling me and my branch to Santander later this year and am contemplating jumping before I’m pushed as they are the only bank in my town anyway (my rbs branch I’m linked to is miles away) and there’s a few hundred quid available in incentives and cashbacks for us to switch early.

Are they any good, any reasons to avoid?

Just wait till you want to get YOUR money out, they have more rules to stop you than anyone.

And thats from personmal experience.

**** useless IME. Made such a mess of setting up my son’s Trust thingy (on behalf of grand-parents) that we dumped them immediately.

Wouldn’t use them for anything.

been with santander for ages, never had a problem, never had anything to complain about…. in fact i once called a branch to speak to the manager to say how helpful one of the staff was.

got all sorts of accounts with them and its all good in the hood so far *touches wood*

With Santander – but only cause I was with Abbey National before they were bought out. Never had any problems, but based on their customer service record I consider this luck more than competence on their part. When I looked at possible moves before First Direct seemed like a reasonable choice – especially if you do everything online.

With Santander – but only cause I was with Abbey National before they were bought out. Never had any problems

Ditto but about to switch because

a.having bought Abbey and Alliance & Leicester they now control almost every personal & business account I have.
b.there are some nice incentives available for switching my current account.

If I were you I’d jump ship and grab the incentives if they are available to you.

I have been with Alliance & Leicester for several years which then became Santander. Online banking is excellent, very easy to use and never any problems. Good interest rate on there current account as well. However you do have to switch accounts every year or so as they are always bringing out new accounts with the good interest rates. The old accounts then revert back to 0.5% or so.

I’ve been with cahoot for ages and they were really good. It all seems to have gone downhill since the Santander takeover though and I’m currently looking to switch banks.

I was always with Abbey National..

things have improved significantly since Santander took over..

I’m an Alliance and Leicester –> Santander customer. Like any bank I’ve used (and I have very little loyalty) it often depends on the person you deal with.

I’ve had a reissued bank card not turn up, and them cancel the old one ahead of the expiry date as I had no idea I was expecting a new card. However, the people on the phone were helpful, and got a replacement card out ahead of schedule, albeit to the account address rather than the branch, but it all worked out.

Had to phone them up from the USA, and that also went well.

They haven’t ticked me off totally , so I’m happy to stick with them for now…

I’ve got a second account with Santander by nature of successive mergers and buy-outs (Burnley Building Society > National & Provincial > Abbey National > Santander). I rarely use it TBH.

I got sweet-talked into taking out a 0% credit card with Abbey when I was in the branch one day, against my better judgement. Did a balance transfer to it and a couple of purchases, acquired some unforseen charge or other and went a couple of pounds over the limit. Suddenly started getting interest charged.

Rang Abbey who explained that it was because I’d broken the terms of the 0% by going over the limit, but given that I’d had it less than a month and the overshoot was minimal, they’d reinstate everything as a ‘gesture of goodwill.’

Directly afterwards, they got taken over by Santander. The interest kept being charged, so I rang Abbey Santander again. Got told in no uncertain times that I went over the limit therefore lost the offer, end of story.

Not the end of the world, but anecdotally, my experience of Santander is that it’s a step backwards in service from Abbey.

I’m a scottish Natwest customer in the same boat. I’ve moved my account to an Natwest branch in Englandshire. No personal experience of Santander, but reviews seem to indicate that they have a history of not being great.

“use a bank? I’d rather die”

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XxUNXWwYWs[/video]

Santander briefly credited my account with £30,000 when I paid in a counter cheque for £3000.

The mistake was rectified faster than the speed of light on the same working day. Amazing how quickly they can move when they want to.

Thanks for the feedback – in hindsight I recon I would have had a similar mixed bag of responses about any bank I’d have mentioned.

Were slower than a glacier when our debit card was cloned. 6 weeks without access to money in the account. Would recommend you don’t use them as your only account. (It’s probably true for all banks though).

That do get slated terribly for customer support but I can honestly say I’ve never had a problem with them at all.

I have three accs with them.. Personal, business and an asset acc. All work as they should and never had a problem transferring out large (to me anyway) amounts.

I’ve found it remarkably hard to get my money back out of my “instant access” savings account. Not helped by their labyrinthine internet and phone banking systems. No it’s fine, just memorise this 16-digit number AND this 5 digit pin number. Oh, you haven’t used it for 6 months? Well you need a new one then. No we can’t do that over the phone, we’ll post you it, you’ll get it in around 14 days.

My next transaction with them will be to empty it I reckon.

Wouldn’t touch them.

sometimes they’re awful, sometimes they’re really helpful. They’re a bank at the end of the day, IME all as good/bad as each other pretty much

Get on fine with them for personal banking, don’t havea buisness account so wouldn’t like to comment.

We have them, they seem OK

Big plus for us is being able to use ATMs in Spain without any charges etc.

We were Alliance & Leicester so cloned into Santander. Online banking is the most user-friendly of the 3 banks I use (RBS & Lloyds TSB being the others).

Reassuringly they’re very hot on fraud.
About a year ago had a call early one morning to ask if I’d made a number of small purchases in the USA. As they suspected I hadn’t, so stopped the card and refunded the transactions immediately.

When we had the house fire in May, our usage of the credit card suddenly increased overnight (buying clothes etc). Again got a call to check if all was well as they’d noticed a sudden increase.

At Christmas I was checking our online statement and found 2 identical transactions for £299 at Dixons Online. Definitely not us so called them. Within 3 hours they’d traced the transaction to a VirginMedia account in Hampshire (rather than us being a Vodafone account in Scotland), stopped the card and refunded the money.

Rob

was abbey, now santander, never had any problems with my 3 accounts.

Mrs B is one of the nicest, mild mannered people you could meet. Samtander got her swearing bigtime. Moved eventually. We have a joint account with them (for a buy-to-let property) and they are hopeless! Can’t get anything right. Last bank I would use.

Been with them for 17 years, back when they were alliance and leicester

No complaints here

Was with A&L, never had any problems, no problems when they switched to Santander either. Plus due to them buying nigh on every branch of every bank ever, its never a problem finding one! (there are three in the small town centre that is Harrogate!)

How often do you actually go into the branch?

Why not switch to a bunch of non-**** e.g. Smile? A building society?

I used to be with A&L with no problems, then everything switched to Santander and strangely money appears and disappears off your statement with no explanation, they’ve ballsed up cancelled SO’s / DDs for my wife.

Switched to 1st direct and get £125 for my (little) trouble.

Went in there for a remortgage meeting recently and the mortgage adviser just called their call centre on speakerphone – including a pre-recorded blurb that Santander had decided even a call centre was too human for. A frankly surreal experience which sums up their approach to customer service. They’re just a pain in the arse to deal with. Try arranging a simple transfer of money in a branch and, if memory serves, they’ll sting you £40 for the privilege.

Cahoot, since someone mentioned them, make Santander look like paragons of virtue. I had a loan with them that started at an interest rate that started in normal loan territory and rapidly outstripped credit card rates for no apparent reason (you expect variable rates, but you don’t expect to be inexplicably catapulted upwards through whole strata of lending categories) On paying it off it took months to actually close the account, which only actually happened after communications had deteriorated to the point where I sent them an email simply saying “PLEASE JUST CLOSE MY F***ING ACCOUNT”.

So, I’d probably say don’t bother.

FWIW I’ve been with HSBC since the days when they were Midland, and I’ve never been able to fault them.

Were slower than a glacier when our debit card was cloned. 6 weeks without access to money in the account. (It’s probably true for all banks though).

Not in my experience.

My wife and I both had our cards cloned at the same cashpoint. She banks with Natwest. They let the cloned card remove all her money and refused to tell us where it had gone. They eventually gave her an overdraft while things were sorted out. But continued to let the cloned card withdraw money!

By way of contrast, my bank, First Direct, spotted the fraud before I did, cancelled the card and sent me a new one immediately. No fuss. No loss.

I’d recommend First Direct.

I can vouch for HSBC (who own First Direct) also being faultless with credit card fraud. As above, they’ve spotted it before I have and have refunded fraudulent transactions with no fuss.

I used to use A&L then got switched to Santander. Fell out with them over a few different things and their useless service, ended up not using the account for 18 months or so having moved that banking elsewhere.

I then get served with a letter from a debt collection agency asking for several hundred pounds on behalf of Santander… having had no contact from them for 18 months I phoned to ask what the …. was going on.

Turns out they had enforced their ‘may charge £5 for not putting in £500 PCM’ clause on the T&C’s despite not having done this for the 12 months or so previous to this, then slapped each of those fees with an ‘outside agreed overdraft’ fee of £25 each month, and interest on the whole lot. When I asked them exactly how they thought they could do this without a peep to me, I was told that they didn’t send out paper statements and the T&C’s clearly stated that all correspondence would be via the online banking. They pursued me with it and I ended up paying about 1/2 the amount in settlement.

So you can imagine what I think to them!

Rant over…. on a more positive note First Direct are fantastic in my opinion, customer service is the best of any bank i’ve used and it’s backed by HSBC so you still get all the branch facilities. They’ll also give you £££ to switch.

Cahoot – been mentioned several times, part of Santander, although I think most of their Cahoot products are closed to new customers. Good job too. My dealings with them made me wonder if they were carrying out some kind of experiment to see how much crud someone could take.

Sept 2010, on holiday in Reykjavik, I find out they’ve let some poohead take ten grand out of my account. They appear to have very little (any?) fraud protection. It took fifty phone calls over the next month to get them to send me the dispute forms and refund my money. When I later asked for compensation for the considerable hassle & bills they would only compensate me (and only to the penny) if I provided evidence of my expenses. Even today I curse them and hope all their bits go wrinkly and fall off.

Think of Santander group as the Activesport of finance.