Support for Nationwide is honestly one of the best in the UK imo. They reply to twitter at 2AM, they answer my calls within minutes and the branch staff have managed to make an introvert with anxiety to the point I can’t talk to cashiers, feel welcome.
Would they actually help you out if you had a real question that isn’t on their script? Or will they just fob you off with “you’re using it wrong”? This for me is the difference between the modern banks and the bullshit ones. With a modern bank I can easily escalate a technical issue to the engineering department if I need to. Impossible with a legacy ones (I had no luck trying to get a legacy bank to investigate an issue with how they calculated the “left to spend” during daylight saving time - it was giving nonsensical numbers for one hour after midnight every day, and even authorising card payments based on that wrong amount).
Also regarding Nationwide specifically, I had a disaster trying to dispute a payment. The first time I called they assured me everything was done, but after a month with no refund I called back and it seems like nothing was done the first time because they payment wasn’t settled yet, and now they asked me to send some proof via email… to an address whose mailbox was full (should I buy a box of hard drives and mail it to them? ), and the person on the phone had no idea how to proceed after that (nothing about maybe just sending it to her company address and for her to do the necessary the next morning when hopefully the tech team figures out the issue with the mail server).
but a flat fee for investing my money to make mibey and paying me a little interest is dumb.
But then again they have to finance branches and tons of monkeys to make up for their horrible systems that don’t allow the customer to do much online… (turns out if you do allow customers to manage their account properly online they’ll have less reasons to call and speak to someone… shocking I know).
I can just pester my local nationwide branch until its sorted though.
When I try to do that they tell me what I already know (make a complaint, send a paper to X address, call X number, etc) and they can’t do much else… and if I keep pestering them they call security.
The only convenience I see from a branch is that when you need to mail papers, etc they usually are nice enough to print them out for you if you don’t have a printer… but this is a manufactured problem as ideally you wouldn’t need papers at all and can do everything online.
Not saying Monzo is perfect here, but I’d rather wait 5 days than take time off from billable work to go to a branch just to be told to contact X number or send a letter and then still wait 5 days.
In the meantime if the Monzo CS is too slow there are other modern alternatives like Starling.
In paperwork Nationwide is in front of the queue:)
Tons of paperwork.
I opened current account online…
Received a letter
Sign it
Send it back to Nationwide
Got another letter that I need go to branch with my ID
… branch
And after few weeks I received my card
I don’t understand why they even bother to allow you to open accounts online if you have to deal with papers anyway. They might as well just make you go to a branch once to get all the necessary paperwork done and provide ID.
So I used my starling card for the first time in a while last night while buying groceries in tesco. Everything went through fine, got my receipt, and left the store. When I got home I went to check my balance and noticed the transaction wasn’t showing in my feed. I found this strange but thought it was perhaps a bit slow to update. I checked again this morning and the transaction still isn’t on the feed. I spoke to customer services who say the transaction was declined (it wasn’t, I have the receipt to prove it) and that something must have went wrong on tesco’s side. So it looks like I have got my weekly shopping for free
Yeah, only took a few minutes. There a nice little Facebook messenger style bubble that appears when you start a chat so you can use others apps and not miss a reply. It all worked pretty well.
I’ve taken the plunge and opened a Starling Account. Decided to switch my Halifax account to starling as it lies dormant and Starling have a richer feature set.
The recent problems with support and the general direction of Monzo compared with Starling has pushed me to take a look at the competition so I think it will be fun to get a greater insight to what others in the fintech space have to offer.
Already I think the app feels quicker/smoother and when I needed to ask a question about switching I got an answer in two minutes. As it stands I’m almost in day 3 of waiting for a response from Monzo
), and the person on the phone had no idea how to proceed after that (nothing about maybe just sending it to her company address and for her to do the necessary the next morning when hopefully the tech team figures out the issue with the mail server).
