Business Banking with Santander

For a number of years ( since 1994) we’ve had a business bank account with Investec and recently they decided to close their business banking in the UK. They sent us a short letter saying that our account would be closed. Hmm … ok that’s inconvenient I thought, we’ll have to change standing orders and direct debits, etc as, they haven’t got an automatic way to migrate these.

On the plus side we’d already got accounts with Santander (originally Alliance & Leicester) so I started moving payments from Investec to Santander

One of the Santander accounts which we hardly use (originally just for PayPal settlements) was a 30 day notice account with Alliance & Leicester (Santander took over Alliance & Leicester). So I checked with Santander at length to see if it could be used for instant access and they said yes it could. Great … I thought.

I started the migration of payment going into the Investec account to the latter Santander account. Payments started going into the Santander account. So far so good.

Next I wanted to pay suppliers from that account. All of our banking is done online so I thought I could do inter account transfers or straight forward standard payments out of the account. Uh uh.

It now turns out that the particular account which was a 30 day notice account with Allliance & Leicester can’t be operated online; I have to use a fax machine to send requests or go the High Street branch! WTF!

The upshot is that Santander didn’t check this properly and now I’m trying to get them to sort it.  Why oh why are banks in this country so inept?