And Aussies whinge about Wankbest™!!

I bought train tickets the other day, for just over £300. (Dont ask, expensive weekend due to some French festival or something). This took my credit card over its limit by £4. So I paid most of the card off completely, waitied the required 3 days for the payment to clear (a WTF in itself), and attempted to use the card, only to be told that there was an over balance of £3.99 left on the card, and it could not be used until that was paid off.

How does this work? I still trying to get an answer from HSBC. I have a card overdrawn by £4, I pay over £350 onto it and apparently theyŕe still worried about the little bit of overdraw. Then to add further insult I had to wait an additional 3 days for the extra payment to clear before the card could be used again. Questioning HSBC about this, once over the phone and twice via netbank support has yeilded three very similar and most unhelpful responses.

¨Mr Carver, the reason youe been unable to use your card is because theres a £3 overdraw on it. It can be used until this is paid@

To which I asked, if Ie already paid over 350 pounds what does an additional 3 matter, all three times they´ve been most unhelpful and haven´t and still havent given me a straight answer. Itś not rocket science people, its a credit card.

In Aus, my credit account was attached to my other accounts in that I could simply transfer money to it when ever required, meaning instant transfers and money on the card straight away. Here its treated like a BPay payment and thereś the holding period for 3-4 business days until the money clears, from my own account to… another account of mine! Hooray for smartness. Also, nothing clears in this country quickly, and you cant tell your available balance easily. I thought I had £400 to spend, only to find out the £350 Id spent 3 weeks before hand was just in the process of being taken out,. Granted three weeks is a little bit of an overstatement, but Hopeless, Fricken Hopeless.

HSBC, I give you a big thumbs down for the time being.

The worlds local bank, shame we f&(k you around uneccesarily with our transfer processes and waiting periods

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 7:17 am and is filed under UK, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.