Are banks indirectly (or directly?!) discriminating against their customers?

[Sloanemoody]

I contacted my bank last night regarding a query I had from an email I received from them. I've had the bank account since I was In high school. Years later I married a wonderful man who thankfully still puts up with me today! Although we decided my bank account was to remain solely mine, we made it into a joint account just in case he needed to get access to it. He did the same to his account for me. He never signed up for online banking or even ordered a card. However I recently found an email stating "important information about your account" was only addressed to him. I was intrigued to find out why this was as usually my online statement emails are just addressed as "dear customer". I contacted NatWest via the messenger FB page. What began as an inquiry soon turned into a rather disturbing truth. At first I thought they had prioritised my husbands name on the account. I hinted towards this belief but they assured me that this was not the case as all joint account holders are emailed separately to their registered email. By pure fault my husband had not added a separate email so his emails were being directed to mine. If he had done so then my bank would have sent important information to my husband, but not thought it was important enough to send directly to me, the account user. Evidence has come to light that they had actually sent this information based on gender. Looking through my older emails from my bank, those addressed to me personally were not deemed as "important information regarding your account" but more of "enter this competition to win 2 years of payments on your mortgage". And the one email I have in my inbox that holds information which my husband also received was titled in a very different way to his, yet held the same information. Even though I have been a customer of this bank longer then my husband has had his name on it, my bank decided that due to gender advertising, it was unnecessary to send me important information I may have needed to know regarding my account. So basically what I wanted to know is, do any of you ladies out there have similar emails from your banks?! And more interestingly how does this work for ladies (or even men if there are any on here!) who are in a same sex relationship with a joint account? Does this mean you are missing out entirely on important information regarding your account?! Please let me know What you think and if you discover the same truth Please let me know!

Mollie yes someone has to be first, but why is that someone always a man?

When we signed up to a joint account with Halifax, my name was put first and DP's name was second as it was linked to my personal account and DP didn't have an account with Halifax. DP then started getting letters addressed to Mr DP DodosNest which I found very funny seeing as we're still unmarried but it got sorted relatively quickly.

I think it's probably to do with the person who actually fills in the paperwork for you and how lazy they are - I'd be very surprised if the actual systems don't have the ability to put women first in 2016!

Far be it from me to defend Halifax but when OH and I transferred our joint account to them the person who handled the changeover
put my name first as my initial came before his in the alphabet. To me that seems a fair way of doing things. In practice I give him the post to open and deal with anyway as he was always complaining about the untidy way i opened the envelope!

Bank send everything joint to both of us, however our estate agent has pissed me off and it's one of the big ones, I was the one to arrange the veiwing, contact them to say we wanted it, requested to be lead tennant on the form and paid the deposit and first months rent - from the joint account but with my card, our reference for the direct debit is still HIS surname!! (followed by numbers so uniqueness isn't an issue) Then despite on the application form filling in our jobs as me unemployed and him teacher and me as the lead tennant they only ever ring him and only give his number out to contractors even after I'd requested them to at least try mine first as I now work shifts so am available much more than dh who they know is a teacher!

Sky wouldn't let me cancel without speaking to my husband last month.

I haven't had this issue, but we've recently moved and despite me setting up the council tax account and paying all the bills, they issued the refund for overpayment as a check in DH's name. Unimpressed.

It's not only banks though is it. It seems impossible for us to have our water bill (for one example) sent to both our names.

This has resulted in us receiving "warning letters" because DH is so lax at opening mail (which is why it needs to be addressed to both of us...I do the admin in this house).

I wonder what century we are in sometimes and the only way I thought I might manage to get round it is by telling them my name is