Face it, Old Bank, you've lost me.

1/11/2013

Here's an entertaining picture of the small print relating to my ongoing effort to close the redundant bank account I don't need under the terms of the UK's exciting new Current Account Switch Guarantee. Nothing wrong with this small print. It's perfectly legible small print. Maybe eight point.
    There are four pages of it in the leaflet I was given when I went in to my building society to arrange the switch. That was seven days ago. The woman handed me the leaflet, we did the filling-in-boxes thing on her screen, then she invited me to read the small print.
    Four pages. Just saying. The assumption that customers will stop in mid-meeting for as long as it takes to read four pages of small type. I wonder if people do. Size of the type isn't an issue; it's the amount. Just saying.
    Anyway. I've got a letter confirming that the switch from my "Old Bank", as the small print calls it, will be completed on 1st November. I've got a letter confirming that my Old Bank has resolved its problems with the switch, and that the switch will be completed on 7th November.
    Less easy to scan into a future blog post is the call I've just had asking me to drop in at my Old Bank with my passport and a utility bill to confirm my identity.
    If you don't know who I am, Old Bank, why are you so reluctant to let me go?

2 Comments

Patricia Finney link

2/11/2013 05:20:07

Every time I'm given one of those 8pt print leaflets to read, I wonder how they'd survive a challenge through the courts by someone with extremely long pockets on the back of the Unfair Contract Terms Act - in that you can't make any changes to the terms and all the banks have pretty much the same ones so you can't go elsewhere to a place that has a better deal. And yes, I have made people sit and wait while I read right through the contract terms. Their problem, not mine.

William Essex

4/11/2013 02:57:37

"Extremely long pockets". Yeah. That's a flaw in the legal system that won't last forever. Assuming an appropriate commitment to truth, a.k.a. saying it like it is, I suspect technology (and in particular social media) gives us a more realistic prospect of redress. Not to mention the various ombudspeople whose responses we can stick up on our blogs. Re technology, you will be aware that the "plebgate" thing now hinges on an apparent discrepancy between a police account of an interview and a secret recording of it.

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