LPA for finance- are there any banks that aren't useless?

[Isitsticky]

DSis and I have financial LPA for mum. Her account is with barclays. We had to spend 1 1/2 hours in branch registering the LPA's. We were told that it was all sorted, but we can't use the app to manage her money (why??).

Basic stuff was ok but when we wanted to put some of her money in a bond, the website wouldn't let me do it. After hours on the phone, we had to go into branch again (another hour). They said the reason it hadn't worked was that they hadn't listed her town of birth.

i wanted to put some of her money in an ISA and, surprise, I can't do that online. Mum wanted to send some money to a DGC who is buying a house, and that won't go through either. They are looking at things and will probably call me, but nothing. I'm done with them.

Does anyone have any better experiences?

But it's not the Bank's job to police deprivation of assets. She wants to do what she's done for other dgc. They allowed me to buy a Barclays Bond for her but not a Barclays ISA.

I found Barclays very helpful tbf, didn’t even have LPA but my dads bank manager suggested I get added as an additional person to his account. Had to confirm everything in branch which was understandable but as I was already a customer my dads account just showed up inside mine online and they sent me a card.

With my mum she just told me the passwords.

Seems like LPA just adds an additional layer of checks and complication.

I found Lloyd’s to be quick & efficient- took a couple of days to sort online.

But I don’t use an app (even for my own banking) and have just been doing it in my laptop & PC.

For £300 you could get a whole new one drawn up and registered and probably a will written (at least in half price wills month).

It's a tiny job to do certified copies - they just run the document through their copier and stamp and sign each page. It's a 15 minute job to get a couple of copies and can be done by a notary or the most junior of solicitors, not a senior partner who charges £1200 an hour.

Nationwide as after initial visit I did all banking online via app. NatWest made several mistakes but the woman in the branch was very helpful. Nationwide are commited to keeping branches open which can be useful at times.

Lloyds were fab! I can see DFs accounts on my login with a link to his. So all transactions I action can be traced to me doing it as LPA.

Nationwide were pretty good too. Took me into a room with Dad and actioned it. However I've been less than impressed over their response to a fraudulent DD on his account. No money lost as he didn't have sufficient in there but having reported once and cancelled DD, they then allowed another through from same supplier! Again, no loss as he didn't have sufficient to pay it but they were reducing it each time so would have got there eventually. I've actually closed that account. Being POA and main carer I do not need any extra work to do.

I've registered them online so most people juts accept online generated codes to get access. Makes it much easier

Actually, @Kyotoorbust, I've just remembered that when I needed to get certified copies of a PoA for Inland Revenue they told me a job centre could do it free. I'm not sure whether those would be accepted by banks etc or whether it's only for other public sector orgs, but it's worth asking.

Lloyds were great and are great whenever i go in. But. Their online banking 2FA involves a text with a PIN.

And because i live outside the UK they will not authorise me for online banking because - i kid you not - sometimes the txts take too long and it times out.

I did suggest they look to using other 2FA methods such as a token or authenticator but so far no dice. So i still can't handle my mum's banking. We have to wait until i can get over, then go in to visit them. It is a PITA tbh. But the rest of it works fine.

Those talking about certified copies. Indeed get some, they are a necessary backup, but you can create an online account with One Gov and set up the LPAs on that and, then, when you need to provide an organisation with access to a copy you generate a code that lasts for 30 days and that specific organisation can use to access.

I've used codes for DWP attendance allowance and care home respite. GP wanted a certified copy of LPA HW and the banks I used certified copies but I did them before I realised the code way was available.

If nothing else it's another way of supplying it to a third party.

Not all companies use the code system I'm afraid. Our branch of barclays wanted to see the actual LPAs and took photocopies of that.

Not sure you can do that on old ones which didnt have an access code to begin with (just checked you can't if before 2016)

@kyotoorbust

OK that's my bad! As they say.

Yes I am dealing with POAs written in 2022.

In Scotland, we don’t have the code system yet. I wish we did. My brother and I set up POA with mum about four years ago, just in time in fact because it was only about another year before she was deemed to have lost capacity and we’d have been in a whole new ball game with the Court of Protection.
Once the POA was set up I heaved a sigh of relief. I thought that going forward everything wouid be so much simpler. But the next six months of my life were consumed by registering the darn thing with each of the many financial institutions that she’d squirrelled her pennies away in over the years (there were about fifteen before I whittled them down a bit).
Each institution had a different way of doing it so I couldn’t even devise a simple spreadsheet showing progress in a standardised way. The evidence required and level of complexity ranged from ridiculously complicated to rather worryingly lacking in rigour.
As I said in my earlier post, and I notice several other posters agree, I’ve had pretty good experiences with Nationwide for mum’s savings accounts. Her main current account is with Lloyds and both Lloyds and Bank of Scotland have also been good, with not much waiting on the phone and helpful staff who know about POA On several occasions when things have been particularly difficult with mum, I’ve talked to staff who were genuinely kind and supportive and did everything they could to ease the process.

Using text messages for 2FA has been deprecated FOR YEARS (because, basically, people can ring up the SIM provider, pretend to be you, and talk them into sending the fraudster a new version of your SIM card).
I get that it's perhaps a little more understandable but they have had YEARS to explain the alternatives to people.

(GRINDS TEETH IN CYBER SECURITY)

I've been involved with both POAs and probate for personal reasons and business clients over 3 decades! Most banks are hopeless. Halifax and Post Office have been the worst on multiple occasions - their staff, even the "specialists" at Head Office are hopeless and incompetent and generally havn't a clue what they're doing.

I've found the smaller building societies to be a lot better, especially Yorkshire and Furness building societies who've generally been really good, efficient and helpful, and my experience over decades has meant I use them personally and recommend them to clients. But I think part of that is that they don't have the same throughput of a revolving door of staff in and out whereas the established building societies seem to have more long term staff who actually build up knowledge and experience.

Barclays and Nat West are a bit haphazard, with some good, some not so good experiences, but usually get there in the end without too much stress.

But Halifax and Post Office take the piss time and time again, losing things, giving wrong advice, not doing things they said they would, and like I say, not just at branch level (which is understandable as branch staff are less experienced with unusual things), but when their head offices are crap too, you know there's something wrong.

I had Enduring Powers of Attorney (that's the old one prior to LPAs) for my parents. For some reason they'd used my married name when they wrote it. I've never used my married name. I had to take a copy of my marriage certificate with me for the first bit of the set up. Otherwise it was ok, bank was Lloyds

@Denim4ever it's more the fact that in suggesting I amend the Court registered EPA, it demonstrates a complete lack of competence within their PoA department, as to do so would be illegal.

thanks @Beaconsfire i'll be over there in a week or two and maybe i'll stop in and have a word, see if they have changed their system.

@unsync anyway, people can legally use different names in the UK - they should just ask to see documentation so they can satisfy themselves the person is the one named on the LPA.
(You know when you register a death and they ask you if the deceased was known by different names? It's so they can put them on the death certificate. And then you can use the death certificate to close down accounts in those names ).

Sorry to jump on someone else’s thread but I have just gained POA for my DF (jointly with DSis). He still has capacity. Should I be registering the LPA with all his banks etc. now or do I wait until he lacks capacity?

At this stage it's up to whether he wants your active help yet.

We sorted my Mum's LPA a few years ago, simply because she was struggling with online banking and she was more than happy to outsource her admin to me. Having all the arrangements in place and access to accounts before they were really needed has made the transition easier. She's a lot older and frailer now and her short term memory is shot, so even though she probably still has decision-making capacity, it's much better that I handle everything for her.

You can only do this for the Finance LPA mind, with the welfare one it just sits on file until capacity is lost.

ETA: if memory serves me right there is a part of the Finance LPA application form where the donor states whether they authorise the attorney to act on their behalf while they still have capacity.

Thanks Distract,

Having seen friends struggle to get lack of capacity recognised for their DPs we thankfully went for POA “as soon as the LPA is registered”.

I think he will want help as he worries about money so will chat to him and DSis about this ASAP.

He seems to go into branch to Santander almost every week (no online banking for him as late DM was very suspicious of it) and takes them a box of chocolates every Christmas. Am hoping this will now pay off when I go to register the LPA!

My relative had accounts with Halifax and TSB and neither were great.

Trying to set it up by phone Halifax asked me to upload a scan of the LPA, but a scan of the document comes out on most scanners' standard settings at about 12MB and the file size limit is 10MB... I tried scanning it at lower resolution to get it below the limit but then they couldn't see it. I also had to give my email address over the phone and they transcribed [email protected] (not my actual address) as [email protected]... In the end I had to spend two torturous hours in branch getting it all set up. It took so long with so much sitting around that I managed to fix two of their office cupboards whose doors had fallen off the hinges, and fix a paper jam in a printer.

Once it was all done and I realised that I could only access the accounts through a PC rather than the app (to be fair, this is detailed on the webpage) I then discovered that I couldn't open new accounts online. It turned out this couldn't be done in my local branch either, and the next closest one's next available appointment was over a month later. So I had to trek into the city centre and they were far more interested in upselling than simply doing what I told them to. They wouldn't open a bond until I agreed to a call from their wealth management advisor in the Schroder joint venture to discuss my own finances! The interview room where this took place was set up with recording equipment, and I'm afraid I used some fairly industrial language at the end to tell them what I thought of it all.

TSB was a lot simpler and all worked well over the phone, but despite agreeing to suspend the relative's access she still managed to walk in to a branch with no ID and no account details and withdraw £300 in cash, because the teller recognised her and didn't notice the block had been placed. They refunded it straight away and paid compensation on top, but it left a very bitter taste about the whole thing.

I personally wouldn't have chosen either of these banks on either product or service grounds, but the next problem I found is that no other bank would open a new account for my relative on the strength of the LPA. She had over £250k across these two banks and I couldn't even transfer funds out to get below the £85k FSCS limit.

Relative has recently since died so I'm waiting with bated breath about the probate process.

OMG, no wonder you drink wine, InveterateWineDrinker. I spent ages on the phone with Barclays today. I tried to log in online to find my access had been suspended (so for my own account as well). When I eventually got through to someone they insisted my mother had requested this. Mother who is on a care home with no phone or computer. So the transfer to DGC has gone through but I wasn't talking to the right dept to ask why I couldn't purchase the ISA online.

My parents still have capacity, but my DF is physically unable to use a keyboard, touchscreen or hold a pen and at Christmas DM suffered a fall and was out of action for a couple of weeks. We had registered all the LPAs a few years previously, but the letters confirming this were not the actual LPAs, only letters saying they were approved, which we hadn't realised having filed them away several years ago.

In our case my parents solicitors held the actual LPAs (or were able to get them from the OPG, not sure) and Mum and Dad had to write to them saying they agreed we could start to act (Dad could just about hold a pen and sign at that point). They then sent us certified copies and I then registered for all the online code stuff which took a couple of weeks. We didn't act straight away but I'm glad I did all that as DF has declined physically and DM mentally since then and we agreed to start acting last week. I am glad we had already done all the certified copies, online account setup in advance and not in an emergency.

So far all I have done is register with Lloyds but that was very easy online (maybe because I am an existing customer).