Customer service? The banks couldn’t care less

After sharing a joint bank account with me for 46 years, my wife Tricia was recently approached by NatWest demanding that she present a passport or driver’s license at a nearby branch for an identity check. If she doesn’t, she won’t be able to access the joint account.

Our local NatWest branch in South West London has been closed for the past few years and is now a Pilates studio. It’s gone alongside Barclays and HSBC, the latter shuttered. Needless to say, the many local building associations have all disappeared as well.

My wife, who is registered as disabled, had to drive into Richmond city center, where parking is atrocious, to show her papers. She made it to the branch in the nick of time, duly presented her passport only to be politely told there was a discrepancy in her date of birth that needed to be corrected.

Why it had been dormant for so many decades, only to become a problem in 2023 is an unsolved mystery.

The inconvenience of branch closures for older customers and the health concerns, not to mention sole proprietorships still using cash, is enormous. Some 5,699 branches have closed since 2015 and the hacking of this vital piece of financial infrastructure continues unabated. Last week, NatWest announced another 36 branch closures.

Banks profit at our expense by taking advantage of customer inertia, by increasing the gross margins they pay to depositors when interest rates rise. The customer, the main source of revenue, is far behind shareholders, executives and other stakeholders in a self-service system.

Banks used to be all about customer service but have completely lost their way over time. I remember as a bright-eyed 17-year-old – who went to university the following year – being taken by my father, a local farmer with a poultry farm in Brighton, to meet his then National Provincial bank manager on North Street . was dominated by large bank buildings in neoclassical style.

The branch subsequently became the Nat in NatWest after a merger. We were greeted as friends, taken to the bank manager’s office where he personally opened my account and made arrangements for my father Michael to receive money from his personal account on a regular basis. We even got a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit.

Our current personal dealings with NatWest, despite paying a £31 per month fee for a Premier account, are virtually non-existent and can be mysterious and shady. The ultimatum to my wife to provide credentials after four decades of writing checks and using joint money and credit cards was bizarre enough.

Earlier this year I received a direct message, in the form of a poorly explained letter and a photocopied document, straight from Fred’s folly at Edinburgh’s Gogarburn (a legacy of Fred Goodwin, the disgraced former CEO of parent company Royal Bank of Scotland ) asking for some forensic financial detail. At first I thought it was a scam, but the letter was correct. From the correspondence it sounded like this was a security check of great importance and without it, as was the case with my wife, the joint account could be compromised.

Most of all, it seemed that the bank was interested in what I did with the family savings and their size. I noticed that much of the information was already at hand, as the bank has access to my direct debits and standing orders, though there are undoubtedly privacy rules preventing access: not that they’ve ever stopped them before.

But it occurred to me that this was no more than a harvesting exercise where the bank considered what additional services it might be able to offer. I never quite got it, but I suspect a follow-up phone call from my “private” bank manager, suggesting there was a lot to discuss, was not inconsequential.

The idea that NatWest has financial services (as opposed to using airport lounges and breakdown service) of any quality is hard to believe. It was about cancelling, not offering financial services. Several years have passed since it apologetically returned a bundle of stock and other assets because it no longer traded securities.

Over the past year, the Putney branch in South West London has returned family documents to me including my Ketubah (Jewish marriage certificate) and my father’s Czech birth certificate plus a stack of insurance policies. Safe custody was no longer a service that had to be provided.

Unless one wants euros or dollars, forex services also seem to have been scrapped with virtually no long waiting times. The worst is the loss of a local branch, where transactions that are not possible online can be carried out with ease.

Apart from everything else, online services can be unreliable. Earlier this month I made a payment of £1500 to a researcher who was helping me on a book project, directly into his NatWest account. My online account showed that the money was leaving and my credit decreased accordingly.

The payment ended up in my colleague’s account, but disappeared as quickly as it came in. It took all of us several phone calls, we went through a maze of computerized votes before we were granted access, and 24 hours to get the money back.

Cora, the friendly online voice, was totally confused by the events.

Now when I want to make a personal transaction, it means a ride to our local subpost office, tucked away behind a stationery store. It is often almost impossible to get in due to the piles of online packages from Amazon, Boohoo, M&S and the like that are returned to the sender.

As for the ATM at the Post Office, it’s the last free ATM on our high street – meaning queues – other than a limited service and ATM outside Tesco Express.

Banks are absent from local commerce amid an overdose of coffee shops, fitness studios and hair salons. The superglue that once held the country’s urban and suburban centers together – the local “Big Four” bank – has become its most endangered species.

There is plenty of opportunity for retail challenger Metro Bank or Sweden’s excellent Handelsbanken there for the taking now that NatWest has lifted its responsibility to the community.