I opened an HSBC account just over a year ago. It was a long drawn out affair. One of the sticking points was getting Barclays to send me six months of bank statements as HSBC wanted them with my French address on them and they had to be originals not printed out online statements. Barclays sent them twice and twice I didn’t receive them. The third time they arrived quite quickly and I was interested to see that they had been sent from Barclays in the Channel Islands and it made me wonder if there was a problem with post from the U.K. to France. I then discovered that they were only going to allow me to have a basic account not a current account and that savings accounts were out of the question. A game of email ping pong then took place where I would ask yet again if I could have a current account and a savings account explained why I needed them and they always replied, no. That was until I phoned them for some reason and asked the person on the phone if I could have a current account. She said that I already had one. I said no it’s a basic account and she assured me that it was a current account. I asked if I could open a savings account and she not only said yes but did it there and then. A week or so later I was listening to Martin Lewis on BBC 4’s Money Box and he was saying about a really good high interest savings account that had to be applied for online and was only open to current HSBC customers so I applied for one of those too. After months of uncertainty everything fell into place. I had been a Barclay’s customer for 50 years but they offered no support whatsoever.
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