Royal Bank of Wankers

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Cacophonix
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#141 Post by Cacophonix » Tue Dec 11, 2018 7:49 am

I don't usually rant on about banks having become inured to their rapacious natures but I must say in this case that I feel like I have been well and truly shafted. It is not the amount, which is only £10.00, but it is the % of the fee as a proportion of the principal amount to be paid that irritates me intensely.

In October I dropped by Kortrijk Airport in Belgium in a spam can. The airport is classed as an 'International Airport' but handles corporate customers mostly with the occasional Ryanair flight with Ryanair probably claiming the airport to be Brussels International, or something like that. Anyway to cut a long story short, the office that handled landing fees etc. had shut, so I filled in a landing declaration form manually, flew off later and forgot all about it only for an invoice to arrive last week.

Silly Landing Fee.JPG
No matter, I thought I will pay the 36,44 Euros and be done with it only to find that this simple transaction would cost me £30.00 for a 1 to 2 day payment delivery and £10 for 3 to 4 days via my Natwest online payment facility. All this on a principal amount of £32.95 (at today's conversion rate)!

I opted for the 3 to 4 delivery of course, but still feel that +- 1/3 of the principal amount as a transaction fee is tantamount to gouging. Am I missing the point? If anybody can suggest a better way of handling small international payments like this I would be most grateful.

Caco

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#142 Post by ian16th » Tue Dec 11, 2018 8:27 am

The best I've found is simply a Credit Card payment.
This only works if the vendor processes the card transaction, if the customer does, he is deemed to be borrowing the money and interest has to be paid.

It is a pain in the proverbial, for small transactions such as magazine and association subscriptions.
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#143 Post by Cacophonix » Tue Dec 11, 2018 8:40 am

ian16th wrote:
Tue Dec 11, 2018 8:27 am
The best I've found is simply a Credit Card payment.
This only works if the vendor processes the card transaction, if the customer does, he is deemed to be borrowing the money and interest has to be paid.

It is a pain in the proverbial, for small transactions such as magazine and association subscriptions.

I did try try to use my card ian16th and even used my best Afrikaans to talk to the folks at the airport administration office yesterday but no, they wanted either a cheque or a bank transfer.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#144 Post by Woody » Tue Dec 11, 2018 9:15 am

I opted for the 3 to 4 delivery of course, but still feel that +- 1/3 of the principal amount as a transaction fee is tantamount to gouging. Am I missing the point? If anybody can suggest a better way of handling small international payments like this I would be most grateful.
Caco, isn’t it possible to use one of the money transfer companies, they give you the best rates and don’t charge for transactions, although they do have minimum payment levels.
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#145 Post by Capetonian » Tue Dec 11, 2018 9:18 am

The best way for small amounts like that is to pay by credit card.

Sorry posted before I'd read above.

I suppose the next best solution is a multi currency account but unless you do these transactions regularly that's pointless.

Fortunately I rarely have to transfer between currencies as I have accounts in the currencies I use regularly. In the past I've found Currencies Direct and HiFX quite satisfactory.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#146 Post by k3k3 » Tue Dec 11, 2018 1:56 pm

I use CurrencyFair for moving money when I can't use a credit card, and when I can I use a Halifax Clarity credit card because it doesn't have a 3% fee like most of the rest.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#147 Post by Capetonian » Wed Jan 16, 2019 10:04 pm

You'd think a UK bank might employ people who had some knowledge of basic English to write their website :
Here’s some of your personalised offers
I'm not implying that whoever wrote this is not British, a non-native English speaker would probably have got it correct.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#148 Post by ian16th » Thu Jan 17, 2019 8:49 am

On January 1st Standard Bank of SA introduced their new Extortion Pricing Guide.

Of inconvenience to me are the new charges for ATM withdrawals.

Previously one could make 3 withdrawals a month before charges, now the limit is R5000 a month!
So a new in house routine has commenced, that uses the Credit Cards more for small payments, that would previously been made with cash.
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#149 Post by Capetonian » Thu Jan 17, 2019 9:02 am

That will.suit the bank fine as they make money on transaction fees.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#150 Post by CharlieOneSix » Tue Jan 22, 2019 3:46 pm

I thought this was a scam - it was just bank incompetence - but it shows how cautious we have become…..

Mrs C16 received an unexpected letter a few days ago from NatWest saying that they were unable to pay investment income into her bank account (not with NatWest) as it had been returned by her bank. It seemed odd as the small investment has been running for many years and NatWest have happily been deducting annual charges from her account with the other bank as well as paying income into it.

There was a form accompanying the letter asking her to give details of the bank account where the investment income should be sent. Alarm bells started to ring. The paper that the letter was written on was very cheap and upon investigation I found out that the NatWest logo at the head of the letter was one that was in use from 2003 until it was superceded in 2014 and in turn that logo was superceded in 2016.

There was a reply paid envelope for the memsahib to send back the form with her bank details. However the address on the reply paid return envelope had been amended with a biro with a fao the guy who signed the letter and the floor number had also been amended by biro. Otherwise the address was genuine and I checked the office block out on Google Maps. At this point I began to hypothesise that a postie could be an accomplice whereby any hand amended envelopes with a particular fao name handwritten were discreetly removed from the deliveries. I couldn't work out how these "scammers" had got hold of return paid envelopes.

There was a telephone number at the head of the letter. I couldn’t find it anywhere on the NatWest website. I was now convinced this was a scam and we contacted NatWest fraud department.

It turned out that it wasn’t a scam. The letter had been written on old paper stock with an out of date logo. The envelope was old stock and had been hand amended as the office had moved from the 3rd to the 1st floor. The telephone number was unavailable to the general public and was for a NatWest back office that dealt with these queries. Somehow after years of doing it correctly NatWest had tried to send the investment income to an account with totally different numbers. Another bank f***up. X(

We are all used to being cautious when receiving unexpected phone calls and emails. I really did think this was a scam – maybe paranoia has set in!
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#151 Post by Alisoncc » Tue Jan 22, 2019 6:04 pm

CharlieOneSix wrote:
Tue Jan 22, 2019 3:46 pm
There was a telephone number at the head of the letter. I couldn’t find it anywhere on the NatWest website. I was now convinced this was a scam and we contacted NatWest fraud department.
Are you sure the people you contacted were the NatWest fraud department? Perhaps they were part of the con. :D
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#152 Post by CharlieOneSix » Tue Jan 22, 2019 6:57 pm

Alisoncc wrote:
Tue Jan 22, 2019 6:04 pm
Are you sure the people you contacted were the NatWest fraud department? Perhaps they were part of the con. :D
Well, as sure as I could be - I certainly wasn’t going to phone the number on the letter and I was sure the website I got the fraud department phone number from was genuine.....and of course at the end of the day there was no con.
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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#153 Post by OFSO » Tue Jan 22, 2019 7:40 pm

Had a card blocked in the UK two weeks ago. Went into a branch of the bank, called their fraud department via the bank's own phone. The fraud guys sent a PIN to my phone, the number of which they already had, so did not need to ask me. I read the PIN back to them over the bank's own phone, minute later card was unblocked. Complicated ? Time-wasting ? It worked.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#154 Post by Hydromet » Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:53 pm

Not actually a bank stuff-up, perhaps the opposite, but interesting.
I tried to make some overseas bookings using one of my debit cards, but kept getting 'unsuccessful' messages. Received an email that a temporary block had been placed on the card due to a suspicious transaction. Quite acceptable, as this card hadn't been used for overseas transactions before. Used the other card (same account) and it worked on the first booking. Contacted Mastercard to have the block removed, which they did, and the card worked fine. Tried to make another booking and was again unsuccessful with both cards. Rang the card supplier again, they checked and advised it had been blocked because of a 'risky merchant'. They could remove the block for 30 minutes if I really wanted to proceed with the transaction, but not permanently. I thanked them, and politely declined. No idea what causes this classification, perhaps repeated complaints about failure to deliver, or unauthorised transactions traced to this merchant or their staff???

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#155 Post by OFSO » Wed Jan 23, 2019 6:14 am

Re post #153 the bank staff told me that they block cards at random to ensure clients call in and confirm now and then. Sounds crazy enough to be true.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#156 Post by Ibbie » Wed Jan 23, 2019 10:23 am

Just had another run-in with their subsidiaries totally incompetent Tax Residence Operations Department this morning.
Despite paying me compo for incompetence, in keep asking for information they confirmed they had held since December 2017 and saying it would not happen again, this morning I received yet another letter advising me I hadn't provided the required info.
Email gone off to complaints manager and operator at department who came out with an A4 sized sheet of excuses got a few flees in her lughole over phone.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#157 Post by llondel » Thu Jan 24, 2019 3:43 pm

I occasionally get an email asking me to contact the card company (which can be by signing in to their website) to confirm a transaction. Usually when my wife buys something, which is helpful because then I know she's spending money.

For the most part, I would expect them to be happy enough if the balance gets paid each month because that's an implicit approval of all the transactions on the statement (or idiot tax if you fail to read it properly).

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#158 Post by FD2 » Sat Jan 26, 2019 7:37 pm

Ever helpful Barclays:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-47006086

She tried to phone her bank to explain the situation but it still took two and a half hours.

I can't even speak to the RBS branch in Aberdeen which is supposed to be handling my account. I'm on my fourth branch because of rural closures around Aberdeenshire but when I wrote to the manager at the city branch to ask who was responsible for handling my account they went to the default 'complaint mode' and sent it off to a complaints handling department somewhere, so I still have no idea who runs my latest branch. I expect the bonuses are still flooding around the senior executives for the improvements they've made to the smooth running of the bank branches. As discussed earlier I really should overcome the 'inertia' and change to another bank.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#159 Post by OFSO » Sat Jan 26, 2019 7:43 pm

Couple of years ago my complaints to the RBS were being handled by a head office in London, a head office in Edinburgh, a security office in the IoM and a customer centre in the English countryside. None of these four spoke to each other so I acted as coordinator. Finally, fed up, I handed the sack of worms to the Financial Ombudsman in the CI, who accepted my complaint as investigation-worthy and did nothing.

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Re: Royal Bank of Wankers

#160 Post by FD2 » Sat Jan 26, 2019 9:47 pm

OFSO - I expect he wrote four stern letters which they immediately filed away somewhere handy. That's the way to deal with complaints...bloody customers.... X(

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