Lloyds Bank Insurance
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Total and Utter Ineptitude
I have imported a machine for my private use from China which has now arrived at Greenock port in Glasgow. Prior to its arrival I contacted a well-established import agent to handle the importation and that agent has today sent me an invoice for payment of VAT, duty and their fees which I today tried to pay, online, from my Lloyds personal current account which I have held since 1975. I logged into my account and set up the transfer and eventually was told that there was a problem and to ring the fraud department. I was not wildly surprised due to the sum involved but got a bit fed up when after waiting 15 minutes to get through to them and having been asked a load of truly moronic questions (despite my explaining the full circumstances to the Lloyds representative) and eventually the call failed. Thinking they might call me back knowing their own system was going to be busy, I waited for 10 or 15 minutes for them to do so but no call happened. So I then rang them back again, waited another 15 minutes to get through to someone, got the same series of daft questions from another representative, again explained the full circumstances and essentially that it was not a scam and realistically any reasonable person listening to me would also understand that it was not a scam. Despite all this Lloyds declined to allow me to *spend my own money the way I want to* and refused to permit the payment to go through online. They said the only way I could do it from my personal account would be via a debit card. Unfortunately the import agent in question does not accept debit cards (not unreasonably). This is not the first serious failure I have experienced with Lloyds. Indeed, I had to close my business account five years or so ago with them after an error on Lloyds' part caused me to temporarily lose access to several thousand pounds and a caused great deal of work and stress over obtaining a court order to get them to release it, a process that cost the best part of a thousand pounds… It's a long story. As a result of my dealings with Lloyds this morning I decided to make a complaint and rang them to do so. I eventually got through to someone and explained the circumstances to them and they said that they would have to transfer me to another department and you guessed it... on doing so, that call failed as well. As a consequence of all this I have decided to terminate my personal account with Lloyds and would strongly recommend that no one be stupid enough to open an account of any sort with Lloyds Bank whose attitude, work practices and systems all appear to firmly reside in the 19th century. Instead I would recommend they try one of the new online ('challenger') accounts. There is absolutely no disadvantage to doing so any longer as the only real advantage of being with one of the main online banks was there approachability and of course that matters for nothing anymore. It is all really rather sad.