So we are to lose the bank that many of us signed up with when it was the only bank left in the village after Portman/Nationwide crossed the M25 divide. In those days it trumpeted a customer charter promising loyalty and to be the last bank standing in Chorleywood. Those promises lasted about 3 years when some 40 branches were closed during Spring 2013 and the charter was quietly dropped.
In Spring 2015 NatWest quietly dropped me, it was so quiet they didn’t actually tell me and I only found out when I went online to discover all my money had disappeared. Then followed an hour of frantic phone calls and online communication before I was put through to their equivalent of MI5 and told by an operative, who could not reveal his name, that my money was safe and I would shortly receive a letter from my branch, he was unable to reveal what the contents of the letter would be.
So I visited my branch ( or what I thought was my branch, seems our branch in Chorleywood is actually Chesham ) told my tale and got nowhere. After a few days of inactivity I finally received a letter from NatWest to say they had been unable to pay some direct debits as there was insufficient funds and could I please square them up with £15 to cover the cost of the letter.
I then tracked down the CEO of RBS (parent of NatWest) contacted him, and his office told me they had closed my accounts, they didn’t want to tell me why but they were going to be kind and give me my money back, after a further nudge I had the charges rebated as well.
Inserting the words `NatWest closed my account` into google yields 205,000 results.
Oh, and don’t even waste your time complaining to the Financial Services Ombudsman, the words organisation and toothless spring to mind.
Michael Duffy