Rejected for Bank account upgrade - HSBC

[FlamingoFlamboyance]

I’ll try to keep this as short as possible, but it’s an infuriating situation through no fault of our own.

Went into HSBC to upgrade my husbands bank account, and the application was rejected. The only reason they can give is due to a ‘recent missed payment’ but they refused to go into further details.

The only thing we could attribute to this was the fact that back at the start of September, Virgin Money credit card tried to take the full amount of my husbands credit card balance from his bank account, when the DD should have been set up to take the minimum (and was showing as such on the app), and consequently the DD failed. Virgin admitted at the time that this was their system error, and my husband was assured that no mark would be left on his credit file (as we had already paid a big chunk off in the preceding weeks, so payments had been met and cleared for the month, nothing was actually missed and manual payments were made well on time).

We make a point of keeping up with credit scores, have accounts to keep track of things with Credit Karma and Experian, and his credit history and records on these both show perfect history, no missed payments, no defaults and he has a rating of ‘excellent’ on both.

Here’s the icing on the cake, HSBC advised us that as he has now been rejected for a bank account upgrade by them, this would be viewed extremely negatively by other lenders, and that we should not apply for ANY sort of further credit in the next 3-6 months as he is highly likely to be rejected.

Virgin maintain that they have not put any sort of marker on his credit file so we are absolutely baffled as to why he has been rejected.

Anyone have any sort of advice on what to do in this strange situation?

Scrutinise his credit file and if that is clear then I would write to them and do a subject access request. I had similar once, rejected inexplicably for a car lease, it was an error on their behalf but put a marker on my file. I complained via the regulator, it was removed.

In my case they had used someone else’s poor credit information at the house I was renting at the time and connected us in error and created a financial association that didn’t exist. That’s probably not happened here but they may have made a different error.

We have gone through his credit files on credit karma and experian and there is just nothing negative on there at all, he has a perfect history.

How would we submit a subject access request and from whom? Apologies I am unfamiliar with this term.

Contact the Guardian money page? They usually get quick results from incompetent companies.

Submit a subject access request to HSBC to see exactly what they based that decision on.

Maybe HSBC noted the amount and that amount of CC debt breaches their criteria.

As stated in my OP, the reason HSBC gave for the rejection is the 'recent missed payment' of which the only thing we can think of is the bounced Virgin money DD (not our error).

The amount was less than £1,000 so not huge at all, albeit still less than was available to take from his current account.

I think it will be that HSBC themselves returned the DD and they can obviously see that on their own records and for whatever reason have used this to turn down the upgrade.

My DSis is having a problem with HSBC around a mortgage at the moment (unrelated to eligibility/affordability more to do with the structure of the house they have already leant on with no issues) and a very reputable whole of market mortgage broker has described them as "difficult" and "a bit picky"

All the mortgage news over the last six months re: lenders pulling mortgages with four hours' notice and similar things has been started by HSBC.

They're like a bank who only really want to lend rich Sultans money.

So it wouldn't surprise me if his credit file is fine but HSBC have put a black mark on his own account with them.

What is not on is them suggesting it's a credit rating black mark.

Honestly, he should just switch to another bank.

Good lord. I just looked at their Trustpilot review.

88% of them are 1 star.

We are honestly wanting to switch to another bank but are now terrified because of this rejection, it'll show up on another banks search and he'll be rejected for that too due to this previous rejection by HSBC.

As they advised us not to try for anything else for 3-6 months!