To think that banks these days are a disgrace and couldn’t care less about their customers?

And what if your bag gets stolen on the way to the branch?

You contact the person who sent you the cheque, get them to cancel the first one and reissue it.

You are 100% right.
I worked in a bank just after I left school.
It was well before computerisation.

I knew every customer’s signature on sight.

We kept the savings accounts by slide rule and pen & paper- honestly!

It sounds Dickensian now.

But we knew our customers, we chatted with them and we looked after them.

Now you are literally just a number and trying to find a branch is almost impossible.

I’ve got numerous bank accounts never paid a fee for them used all there services
im sure if we all paid a fee for bank accounts we’d have a branch in every town

Totally.

the bank know a crime has been committed. They have proper evidence - a deceased persons bank account was used for a year after her death. the bank was not told this person had died until the beneficiaries started asking where the money was.

it has been reported to them. They will only take a report/complaint from the executor of the estate.

guess who the individual taking the money is? Yep, the executor. So now they have been allowed to close the account and withdraw the remaining balance.

no consequences, no referral to their fraud dept, no police report.

they should have an obligation to report fraud and criminal activity on an account. It’s shocking that they can have a fraud report and do nothing.

But what if it gets lost in the post - especially if it's for a sizeable amount? It'd be gone for good with no record or trace, just like that.

Tbh not all banks were bailed out and the government retained shares which they either still own or have sold to retrieve the money they put in.

They have never cared. They may have pretended to when it was necessary for a competitive edge but really it's always been about the bottom line.

And you can pay cheques in at the post office.

I really like online banking but it's all gone too far now and too many people are excluded. I'm not surprised it's Barclays either because they're shit. I was with them for many years but I think that their focus is now on business customers, not residential ones. Its very difficult to speak to an actual person about anything.
I'm also not surprised either that fraud is at record levels now.

My local bank has closed down (in a fairly large town of about 100,000), there is now just a little kiosk in the local library on 2 days a week.

It's shocking, banks make billions in profit, were bailed out by the government not too long ago, but can't be bothered to keep local branches open.

Can i recommend Nationwide? They are keeping all their branches open. (If you want I have a recommend a friend code)

www.nationwide.co.uk/about-us/branch-promise/

You can post a cheque to your branch saying ‘please pay into account number xxxxxxx sort code 00-00-00’ add your full name and address and sign. No need for paying in slips.

I live in London in zone 3, they are in the process of closing most of the banks on our high street. One of the ones that has closed is available in the next area so 10 min distance but 20 min bus ride door to door no big deal but it’s an open desk in a cafe! No privacy, no screens, just a guy/woman on a laptop on a table in a cafe!

The thing is banks have never cared, they are the foundation of capitalism and they won’t care at all but this is ridiculous.

You can pay cash in at a post office btw

Decline in the UK service sector….. brexit

Yeah, this. I recently randomly had my debit card stopped. Had a text saying, 'we have cancelled your debit card, as there's been suspicious or unusual activity linked to it. We will send you a new one ASAP.' That's all it said. I don't know why, whether somebody I know had been trying to use it or buy something on it, whether it was something to do with ebay or paypal, whether it's some shop I've been in that's been trying to use it or clone it, it didn't give me any clue.

I got this message on a Friday night at 11pm!. I thought it surely must be a scam - so I rang Barclays the next day. (The bank's 'helpline' is open from 9am till 4pm or so on a Saturday I think.) May as well have been shut. The woman I spoke to didn't have a clue. 'I can't see anything on your account, about a new card being sent, and the old one stopped' she said.

And I said, 'well, what am I supposed to do? I don't know if this is a scam! What if someone is scamming me and they send a fake clone card and have instant access to my bank account?' She said 'you'll have to go to your local branch.'

I said 'I don't have a local branch. It's 20 miles to my nearest Barclays - as my local one was closed down 2 years ago. Do you have the number for the branch that is 20 miles away?' 'I don't have it,' she said. 'Give me a few minutes. I'll speak to someone else and see if they can see what's happened.' 7 minutes I waited, and then she came back and said 'I'm sorry you'll have to contact this customer services helpline on Monday - the people who can give us more information only work Monday to Friday!.'

I rang Monday and it took me over half an hour to get to speak to someone, and I was on the phone nearly 15 minutes after that trying to find out what had happened. I did find out in the end that it was genuine. They had actually stopped the card and were sending a new one out, as there had been suspicious activity on it.

But they STILL couldn't give me a reason why ... So what on Earth was going on? Why was the card stopped? I will never know, so I can't try to avoid the situation where my card got 'compromised!' All they said is 'some algorithm in their software picked up an issue' but NO fucker knows what it was! FUCKSAKE!

Also agree hugely about lots of people over 70 going to places like the bank and post office and suchlike, for the company and for a chat, and yes, a lot of them can't do stuff online and NEED the bank! ... And I'm not being ageist, so don't somebody of 73+ come at me and say, 'well, I can do it!' because a lot of people can't over that age.

When my local Barclays branch shut down, they claimed only 13 people a week were using it once a week or more, which I think is absolute bullshit, because every time I went in there, (which was maybe 3 times a month,) there was at least 10 people in front of me. And every time I passed it, (15+ times a month,) every single time, there was maybe 10 or 11 people in the queue.

So I call absolute bullshit. I think some things haven't affected me by being shut down because I can buy a lot of stuff online and do a lot of stuff online. But I really, genuinely miss the bank being there. And some people are now missing it way more than me. Other things I miss are Argos and Wilkos. My local Argos shut down last year, and the nearest one is 20 miles away, and Wilkos has gone altogether of course.

@LunaNorth YANBU at all OP!

Most banking apps let you pay in cheques. They take a photo of the cheque.

YANBU @LunaNorth

YANBU @LunaNorth

The company I work for banks with Barclays, I needed to collect some currency (for work). I work in Bristol. There is currently NO BRANCH open in Bristol (TBF this is temporary as they refurbish the only branch). But seriously, the WHOLE of Bristol has no branch open at the moment. I had to go to Bath.

My daughter sold her car. The DVLA sent her a cheque for her tax. The nearest bank is 17 miles away and she doesn't have a paying in slip in the back of her (unused) chequebook like in the olden days to put one in the post. Similarly, I closed a credit card account and Nat west sent me a cheque, presumably written by someone with no fingers, in spite of the fact that I have three accounts that they could have paid it in to. I have a full time job, it takes 50 minutes to reach and park within walking distance of my nearest branch.
Basically the larger organisations ( incl those who send out share dividends) are relying on the fact that we cannot cash the cheques. Total Bastards

Where I live the local convenience store , bakery and pub prefer cash and the 2 shops have a minimum charge on card, so if I'm buying a pint of milk or a loaf of bread I need to pay cash. We keep a tin of cash in the kitchen for this reason and to pay tips to takeaway delivery drivers. After a while the tin is full of silver and coppers and I bag it up to take to the bank. Twice now I've waited in a queue only to get to the front and they say they havent got pound coins! I think it's a bit ironic that a bank doesn't have cash! And I'm not asking for 1000 pound coins just £20 or £40.

A big problem is how the banks manipulate the statistics.

They tell us that 95% of all transactions are now done online and leave us to interpret that as everybody banks online, but just do a small percentage of their banking in branches through laziness or out of habit.

Of course, the truth is that pretty much 95% of people do ALL of their banking online, meaning that the remaining 5% is ALL of the banking of a great many elderly, disabled and vulnerable customers. The banks know this very well; they just really don't care.

I'm a big fan of technology, but I realise its limitations. The other day, HSBC's banking app was down for an extended period, meaning that I had to leave my shopping in Morrisons and go home empty-handed. I had the money to pay for it, but the bank wouldn't allow me to access it. If I'd had enough old-fashioned, outdated, obsolete cash on me, I'd have been able to go home with my shopping with no drama or worry at all.

Fully agree. Cognitive decline to some degree is a fact of aging, even for those without dementia. How many of us have spent hours on the phone trying to explain how to work the tv remote. The thought of trying to cope in the modern world when I too get old frankly terrifies me.

Banks can't afford it?! LOL - those poor banks on their uppers and struggling to make ends meet!!