When complaints are taken to the Ombudsman a firm pays a £500 case fee to them, regardless of whether they win or lose the case. The number of complaints about a firm is also now recorded and published by the Ombudsman on their web site (which the press also pick up on). So, if you want to get the Co-op Bank’s attention about this, then referring your case to the Ombudsman may be the way forward.

- you don’t get a running total of what’s in your account (making it hard to budget)
- the ‘available balance’ is pointless as it doesn’t factor in things such as earmarked funds from debit card payments (if you go to a cash machine, you get a totally different figure)
- you can’t search for transactions on your statements (why does an internet bank need ‘monthly statements’ anyway??? Makes it very user unfriendly as you have to keep going to a central page to click on ‘pages’ of your statements.
- you can’t download statements.
- Faster payments are rubbish. You can only send a limit of £150 (when the system is actually working).
- Paying money in (particularly cheques) can be a nightmare. Branches are few and far between, and paying in via the post office is a hit and miss affair – it can take from a minimum of 4 working days, right up to 6 or 7 working days before the transaction even appears on your account (you’re not earning interest on the cheques in the meantime either). Although the funds are then available to you when this transaction does eventually show up on your account, they are not actually ‘cleared,’ as I subsequently found out when a cheque I’d paid in that way bounced. So, you can be waiting up to 10 working days before you know that a cheque has indeed been formally ‘cleared.’

The whole group also suffers from a corporate culture that used to be associated with a lot of mutual companies – amateurism and muddling through as long as they don’t have to spend any money on anything.

Speaking for myself, I’ve had nothing but trouble with Smile. I now only use them as a budgeting account, and, if I’m honest, as a source of easy money. They have done so many simple things wrong over the years that I inevitably end up with them paying me compensation. I’ve had around £600 from them over the past 3 years for basic errors they’ve made. These include:

- Promising to send me a new debit card before I went on holiday to NYC (as it was due to expire when I was away). the card did not arrive as they said it would, and when I told them, they cancelled the wrong debit card, leaving me with no access to the money in my account. They then took a further FIVE weeks to send me another debit card and pin number. This case went to the Financial Ombudsman who ordered them to pay me £150 in compensation. Smile then took a further 6 weeks to pay me the money, and we had to threaten them with enforcement of this payment by the FSA.
- The previous year they ‘forgot’ to order me a new debit card at all which I had to chase up with them and which took weeks.
- I lost my Smile credit card in 2008. It was a few days before my statement was due. When a credit card is reported lost, it screws up their antiquated IT systems and you (and seemingly they) can’t access your accounts until the new one has been issued. I called them up to ask what my minimum repayment should be and they told me a figure. It turned out that this figure was wrong, I had underpaid, and they wanted to charge me £30 for it.
- They messed up balance transfers from other credit cards I have by typing in the wrong digits.
- They recently bounced cheques from my account, despite the fact that the money was in my account to cover them – the smile web site showed that the cheques had indeed been paid out with no problem – until 5pm that day. Then they were shown as returned. When I contacted them they said ‘oh if you had contacted us before 3pm we could have sorted it.’ To make matters more confusing, the smile systems then completely wiped the record of those cheques (and their subsequent ‘bouncing’) from my account – making it harder to find the day all this happened when I subsequently complained.

All in all, the Co-op bank, and indeed Smile, does offer a pretty sub-standard service. They do get away with a lot of things that other banks wouldn’t – simply because they have an ethical investment policy.

(Yes I know I can use telephone banking but my experience last time I used this was these phone transaction take 4 days, rather then 3 via internet banking so there is nothint to be gained anyway!)

org.omg.CORBA.NO_RESOURCES

I have sent an e-mail to the IS Director which was never answered, and complaints on the phone have always been answered with the standard response that a new system will come into place soon – same answer for the last 4 years!

If this was my business, I would have had the IS Director frogmarched out with a cardboard box. If you can’t resolve a problem like this in 4 years, you have no idea how to run information technology infrastructure – go get a job at McDonalds. Or maybe not, because people would have to wait an hour for their meal.

So, dear Board of Directors of the Co-op bank: Please fire your IS Director. Thanks.

We’ve just changed to the Alliance & Leicester for the two businesses I run the finances for now and the improvement is vast, and the cost of banking much less. A no-brainer I’d suggest.