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Name: Jean-Louis Eveque

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Like waiting in a telephone queue and indigent service? NatWest is the bank for you

1
We are a small interior design business. We strate as a limited over 10 years ago and banked with NatWest from day one. We recently needed a second debit card for our business. We contacted NatWest 3 weeks ago and were expecting to see the new card turn up in the mail. When we contacted NatWest to ask where our new card was, we found out that: 1/ NatWest had us on their records as a sole trader account all this time, not a limited 2/ In the last 10 years, NW did not find it useful to call/mail us not even once to check on how we were doing or to update their records. When I questioned them about it, they seemed to think it was perfectly OK. 3/ You do the leg work for them: they mess up, but YOU have to reapply, call and run around for forms. It is not like they are going to say, "damn, we were really under the par on that occasion, let us allocate someone to help the client with the paperwork and make a smooth transition. NWest borderline accused us of not filling the forms in due time or hiding stuff. Never did they even think "may be we got it wrong on our end". The one word we never hard was "we are sorry". 4/ Their telephone prompt system must have been designed by a former special interrogation agent: it is designed to inflict maximum pain and have you cave in and abandon all hope. It is an exquisite form of mental torture. When you eventually manage to get to an operator, you have to retell the whole story as they cannot access you notes. They cannot call you back. You can't email them. It is an autistic relationship. No one ever took ownership of our problem: you ALWAYS end up being told to call number XYZ and to start the process again (name, security check, ...). You are NEVER transferred directly to someone who can help. In view of this, simply transferring our "sole trader" account to "limited" means starting from scratch, no help from NWest here. So I will call Santander, the bank our our business trades with. Might be quicker, can hardly be worse than this customer experience we had with NWest. Reviewed on: 9th November 2016