If you pay a cheque in to your bank account and get a receipt, then you would think that your money is safe...right?
Not for NatWest business customer Stella Hulott, who found out that when you have a completed paying in stub, if the cheque subsequently goes missing once out of the Bank’s domain, you are on your own and it is up to you to get another cheque.
Following a string of errors by the NatWest Bank in Margate, Kent – who admitted leaving her cheque and paying in slip in a bank cupboard instead of sending it off to the Clearing House – once found in the cupboard, the cheque was then ‘specialled’ to another branch to help speed up the payment process.
When the cheque went missing, presumed lost in transit, Stella was told not only by the branch but by their Customer Relations team too that it was Royal Mail’s fault,
it was nothing to do with NatWest, and she’d have to go and get another cheque from her client.“It beggars belief,” says Stella. “I had a receipt which, to me, means that the cheque was now in the safe hands of – and the responsibility of – the NatWest Bank.
“However, I was told by two different people that if the cheque did not arrive, even though this was a chain of events started by their incompetence, I’d have to get another cheque from the client.”
Stella – who has been with the Bank for over 25 years and has several accounts with them, including her Business Account – adds: “I feel extremely let down and disgusted by NatWest, the way they feel they can absolve themselves of something because it was no longer ‘their liability’, even though it stemmed from their complete and utter incompetence.
“I run a very successful and busy company with my husband and have wasted hours and telephone calls over this one cheque. The client who sent the cheque was also getting irate as without the cheque being paid in, I could not supply him with a service, which he needed urgently.”
Luckily, the cheque finally turned up and the payment cleared okay.
Despite this, Stella is still angry with the bank, saying: “With everyone feeling the pinch financially, I am disgusted how an organisation as huge as NatWest can so shoddily treat their customers. I certainly don’t trust them to handle my finances at all.”
Recent figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) have shown that financial institutions received 84,212 complaints directed towards them in the first half of this year.