Savings

[damerell]

National Savings offer an ISA. Do they understand RFC822? No. Can they arrange to accept valid email addresses before April 5th when told about this on December 26th? No. (For comparison, the Discworld Convention fixed the same bug in two hours.) They can take the application over the phone, which would be lovely if I was going to put three thousand quid in an _online_ account with an organisation who can't fix a trivial Website bug. One might die before they could fix anything serious.

Nationwide offer a Regular Savings account. What do they do with the application form if you hand it in in person? Well, as far as I can make out, they take it from you and they hide it so they can't find it again.

This is not really a request for advice, since I suspect incompetence is fairly evenly distributed and I've just been unlucky, just a venting.

Comments

[naath.livejournal.com]

:-(

I don't think I've ever given a bank my email address - email purporting to come from bank are so common that I do not believe that I would ever trust one. I like my banks to have branches where I can go in and complain at people when they screw up.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd trust email allegedly from them either, but it would be interesting in and of itself if a damerell+foo address given only to a particular organisation leaked to the bad guys.

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad I gave a foo@bugshaw address to PayPal. I've only ever had legitimate emails to it.

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

Is there some reason why you don't want to use 0damerellk.foo@ ?

[damerell.livejournal.com]

As detailed above, it seems unwise to put large sums of money in an online-administered account with people who can't fix a trivial bug.

[rmc28]

I have heaps of trivial bugs I'm not allowed to fix before the important ones (though it's even worse at the moment while we go through a "9-month" major system upgrade that I fully expect to overrun).

[damerell.livejournal.com]

OK, so maybe they're snowed under with non-trivial bugs. Also not very encouraging.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be 'interesting'. I wonder if it's possible to do anything nasty to them should such a thing happen...

[grumpyolddog.livejournal.com]

The co-op ( http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/ ) also offer an ISA. That may be to banking customers only - i don't know - but I've never had any issues with them.

[juliet]

I have one with Smile (their online branch) & have also not had problems; although I don't know if they have this particular bug.

[simont]

Have I missed the point, or is your calendar a month fast?

[damerell.livejournal.com]

No; they have just informed me that they see no prospect of it getting fixed by then. You might suspect that they have contracted the process out to a bunch of complete Muppets, and you would be correct.

[lnr]

Regular Savings account: I applied for one online, it didn't seem to be happening and I was doing other stuff so I applied for one in my branch as well, and actually paid a cheque into it. Now I have two of them. I have no idea what would happen if I pay money into the other account as well though. Keep meaning to go get it closed.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you should make the spare one a joint account with me and then withdraw from it IYSWIM. :-)