OK, just to start off, this will be a full-out rant at Natwest. The service that I received over the weekend shows no respect for their clients and who is actually the client.

It all starts off on a beautiful day in London. Sarah and I have to go and organize the deposit for our new place in Hanwell. Because the estate agents need the money as soon as possible I want to go into a branch and organize it the same day instead of the normal 3 days to transfer money.

After browsing the Natwest site, we find that in London there are 3, yes 3, branches that are open on a Saturday. The closest one to us is in Camden which is about a 40 minute ride on the tube. So off we go to Camdem to organize the money.

We arrive at Camden and are told that same-day transfers will only arrive in accounts on Monday (why is it called a same-day transfer again?) so I ask if it is possible to withdraw the money over the counter as cash. Not a problem… as long as you have ID, which I don’t. Sarah has though. I ask the manager if it was OK to transfer the money to Sarah’s account via the Internet. “Not a problem, Internet transfers clear immediately” says the manager. Now here is the important part. I ask for confirmation that they transfer immediately. Yes is the reply. Perfect…. I think.

After we transfer the money, we stand in the queue and ask to have the money transferred. “Oh sorry, but you transferred this today and it will only clear on Monday” says the teller. By now I want to rip heads off of small children so we go back to the manager and ask her what the hell is going on. She says that she is really sorry, she didn’t know. I had made it abundently clear to her that I needed the money that day or we loose the house and that she had to make sure that the money would clear.

I suddenly realised that the money is showing up as available in Sarah’s account. I told the manager about this. Lots of stammering started coming out of her mouth with phrases like: “Not sure”, “Security Measures”, “uuuuh” and things like that. This is when I lost my temper and told her that it was my money, not hers or the banks and that if the money is showing up as available, it is mine to do with what I want. Cutting this shit short, I finally got her to admit, that even though it shows up as cleared, it hasn’t really and that it is a LOOPHOLE that allows anyone to withdraw funds via an ATM.

How can a bank deny access to a client’s funds like that? If the money is available (i.e. the bank is not dealing with it) then the client must have full access to it. I don’t mind waiting for 20 minutes while they rush around filling it forms for me to get it, but at the end of the day it is my money, not theirs. I deposit money into my account for safe-keeping and interest and the bank makes money off of me. I am the client. There is no argument that the bank can have control over the usage of my money. Natwest, if you are reading this, please know that I will be changing banks as soon as I can. Thank you for 1 year of the worst service I have ever received from any bank.

This is on top of the time they charged me for going into debit. I keep all my money in an investment account and almost nothing in my primary account. I withdrew £30 from the account and there was only £20 in it. After confirming with the bank before that this should have been impossible and it was their fault, I still got charged £25 for going into an unarranged overdraft. After fighting it and getting the fee recinded, they then started lecturing me about how to handle my money. Ironic isn’t it, when their system suck so bad and they want to tell me how to handle my money.

Yeah, right.