Anyone using Abbey Nationals business account?
I find it to be very very poor - rubbish communication, can't get to my account on line, local branch a joke. How about you?
I use the Abbey bank for personal and business banking.
Yes the website performance has been much poorer over the past year. It may bew coincidence but it seemed to get worse around the time that Santander took it over. You may already be doing this but to access your business banking account, DO NOT go through
www.abbey.com to click the relevan buttons. Instead, go directly to
www.anbusiness.com . I find the access is much easier that way.
As far as local branches go, they do not get involved with the busainess banking side of things. When I joined, this was made clear to me from the beginning. In order to provide the FREE service, it must all be done online or by telephone or post. I've no problem with that side of things as the service is free and for it to be free it is reasonable to expect them to run it the cheapest way - especially as this was made clear from the beginning. If I need to phone them, most of the time the call in answered in fairly reasonable time and usually by someone who has English as their first language (though sometimes with a Scottish accent
) .
I have two main gripes with them.
1. is that they don't seem to answer emails
2. is that they don't provide the payment reference number for BACS payments until the 1st of the following month. This can be pretty inconvenient for businesses that provide a frequent repeat service such as ours.
Number 1. I can excuse to some degree as paying someone to read and answer emails is an extra cost
however
2. is inexcusable because all it needs is a one off tweak of the coding on their website.
It's not as if it can't be done either because they manage to provide all the reference numbers in real time on their personal banking website.
This issue alone could be enough for me to jump ship. Indeed, I would happily pay a £5 a month fee for the release of this information in real time.