A&L account will be switched over to a Santander one soon - is this good news?

[Ponders]

We've been with A&L for 15 years & have mostly been quite happy with them, & since Santander took over it hadn't made any difference, but now when I go online it says 'We will shortly be moving you over to the new and improved Santander Online Banking service'.

Anybody else been moved over already? How has it been?

I have Abbey & A&L accounts and have switched, it's not that different tbh, the login process is more like the A&L one rather than Abbey.

thank you, xalala - you haven't had any problems dealing with Santander then?

atm if I have to ring A&L it goes to their old call centre in Bootle (or thereabouts) - will that change, do you know?

Santander now do faster payments - finally! so online payments you make will go through in 2 hours instead of 4 days.

Customer service is still shite though. Might be why Santander have just brought all their call centres back to the UK. They were appalling.

A&L have been sort-of doing those for a few months, headfairy - but only to a max of £300, & not guaranteed either, sometimes they don't get "picked up" as faster payments (I've had words with A&L about this!) Is Santander the same? I have a Nationwide account too though & they are brill, daily max of £1000 & faster payments will go through up to about 10pm, so any surplus funds from A&L are transferred to Nationwide to pay bills etc when I need to.

In what way have their customer service been shite - just the language thing, or more? A&L are generally OK (apart from eg saying "oh, that payment didn't get picked up as faster payment", when that meant it didn't pay off a credit card in time )

Have they? Abbey didn't have them for ages, even after they became Santander. I think it's only happened in the last few weeks.

customer service was rubbish because they couldn't do anything. If you ever called them up during the day they'd have to transfer you to a UK centre (and you'd have to explain the situation all over again). Not sure if that'll change. I soon learnt that if you call them outside of normal office hours (but within their operating hours) you go straight to a UK centre anway and they can deal with your problem directly rather than being passed around the houses.

The last time I spoke to the A&L call centre (a couple of months ago) they definitely said our contact details wouldn't change - we would still ring them, & post cheques in envelopes pre-addressed to them etc.

I wonder if Santander are going to expand that call centre, as it's already part of the group, to take the calls from when they close the overseas centre? If so you might be pleasantly surprised...

Santander are completely and utterly shite.

mmm, that's what I fear, DragonAlley

We have a Santander credit card with a direct debit payment set up, & during all the merger confusion they managed to fail to take the regular payment & then sent us a snotty letter for not paying (not just us, obv), so I am a bit about them

otoh the credit card is great as it makes no charges for use abroad & our A&L current account includes quite a good annual travel insurance policy

I am considering switching to Nationwide altogether but will wait & see...

Santander don't do customer service. I won't step inside one of their offices again (too long to detail on here)

I agree Santander are rubbish. In addition they charged me £7.50 in o/d charges just for bing o/d on average less than £50. They charge 50p per day of being o/d regardsless of the amount. Previuosly i used to get charged less than 50p per month

..and I have to say, I know we might think some banks are too big to fail (have we short memories?) however the financial mess in Europe hasn't unravelled fully yet and Spain is in a big mess. Santander (being Spanish) must be exposed to those bad house loans someway along the line.

Anyone been there recently and seen the thousands of empty new builds slowly deteroriating (not to mention the BTL brigade trying to pull out).