Stability is our watchword!
Written: Jan 16 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good reliability and range of products, fraud team seem to be on the ball...
Cons: ... not the best customer service or interest rates, some high charges
The Bottom Line: A good bank overall, but a few niggles might tip the balance the wrong way for some.
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| captaind's Full Review: Barclays Bank UK |
I’ve been a customer of Barclays Bank, the third largest British bank, for close to 14 years now, which is a scary thought in itself – I’m getting old… They’re not perfect and recently they’ve got on my nerves by charging me an excessive amount for going (briefly and marginally) over my overdraft limit, but all in all they’re reasonably good. Most other banks also have the same dodgy practice that I mention above, so I can’t hold it particularly against them – just again banks in general!
My current account has been with them for all 14 years, and overall I haven’t had many problems with it (apart from the above charges). The interest rates on current accounts are never very good, and Barclays are in all honesty among the worst for this. On the other hand they are an extremely financially stable organisation (inasmuch as any organisation can be truly stable), more branches than most other UK banks, and their cash machines (ATMs) will deal quite happily with a number of credit and debit cards other than Barclays. The cash machines were among the first to be fitted with anti-fraud devices in this country, and personally I have yet to be a victim of this time of fraud (long may it continue…)
Speaking of fraud, one thing that did impress me was when I’d decided to use my debit card to clear a number of payments in one go. A couple of days later I received a letter from the fraud office at Barclays asking if these were really all my transactions because it was suspicious that they all go out on the same date. While cutting out fraud completely is probably impossible for any bank, this at least showed that they had methods in place to try to reduce it and were interested enough to check up on something suspicious.
The customer service is rather variable – there have been times I’ve been very happy with them and others that have left me fuming. The problem has got somewhat worse since they moved their call centre to India – there just seem to be so many things that the staff over there aren’t authorised to do. Barclays is another company whose online service I tried to sign up to, failed, and couldn’t be bothered with. The fact that they still have a large number of branches is good, as normally you can get what you need to sorted out that way, though our local branch, as with most, is usually pretty crowded so long waits are inevitable.
Signing up for an account way back in 1993 was painless enough, as far as my memory goes anyway, and since then I’ve opened savings accounts a couple of times. Since I was already a customer the process for doing this was quite quick and certainly hassle-free. They do have a large number of accounts to choose from, rarely among the better interest rates admittedly but some of the accounts have good bonus interest rates if you don’t take money out more than once a year. If I had enough money I like the idea of their “overflow” account, whereby anything over a certain limit in your current account is automatically transferred to a savings account, while if the current account drops below a certain limit it is topped up from the savings.
If you want a Dollar or Euro account, don’t even bother asking at the smaller branches – they will merely look at you strangely and wonder why on earth you might want such a thing. Bigger branches can help you but even then it’s a rare request so might take them a while to deal with properly.
If you end up not having a USD account but have USD cheques to pay in (from, oh, I don’t know, Epinions maybe?!? :-D) you have to sign a form and the bank will sell your cheque on the foreign market, then crediting your account with the amount minus commission. They will send you a letter when this is done to let you know the amount and date this happened. One hint regarding this – I paid in a cheque of a little over a hundred dollars, and got charged about thirty dollars… another time the cheque value was a bit over a thousand dollars – I got charged about nine dollars for this one! It seems then that the higher the cheque value, the quicker it’s sold on the market and the less commission you get charged. Sadly I don’t get enough Epinions cheques to test this theory out more fully… (If you get money from GoogleAds, get it paid directly into your account rather than get a cheque, that way you don’t have to pay any commission!)
There are many other products available from Barclays, including insurance policies, business banking, and mortgages (much better since they acquired The Woolwich). They have a serviceable range of debit and credit cards. The bureau de change offers pretty good value for money and even in smaller branches usually has all the major currencies available.
As far as Barclays presence in America goes, I think it would happen either through acquisition of small American banks by Barclays, or though Barclays being taken over or merging with a major US bank. It’s been linked with Bank of America for ages, though to my knowledge nothing concrete has come of this at time of writing.
Overall Verdict
Strengths of Barclays are: Stability, range of products, number of branches, fraud team don’t spend all their time asleep.
Weaknesses: not exactly an innovator, some customer services issues, not great interest rates, some excessive charges.
I would recommend Barclays to people who value reliability above most other things a bank might provide.
(Thanks to mrisch for adding this to the Epinions database for me.)
Also in Personal Finance:
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Recommended:
Yes
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