Natwest Business Account

I have banked with them for 17 years, in the last 2 months my bank charges have gone up from £25pm to £180pm, they now charge for anything and everything, ie.. bacs received now is .30p seems like nothing x500 customers paying you =£150pm, if that isnt daylight robbery there is no handling or labour involved,it used to be free, so how can they justify it.

Well spoke to my business manager and he said, well Natwest have decided to put a flat rate on every business, sorry there is nothing we can do.

Oh well that must be ok then.

Think not... Bye Natwest enjoy losing lots of business,

Oh and thanks for your loyalty to my business

I have recently set up a ltd company and wanted a business account that i could view together with my Natwest personal accounts online.

After a lengthy and fairly confusing application process I have been given my account details and debit card. I also received an email saying I would receive a customer number within 10 days.

In the meantime, I spent a lot of time trying to link my business account via an online process that frequently times out and doesn't allow you to complete the process. This was on the advice of the business helpline.

After a number of phone calls, I have discovered that Natwest DIRECT Business banking is a completely separate organisation to the standard Natwest business account.

It is not possible to link your personal accounts to your business accounts, which makes the account useless to me. I'm also unable to get any account information (online or telephone) without a customer number. I have just received another 8 page form to fill in to get a customer number that should have been provided automatically.

I have already given my account details to clients and set up banking mandates, so I am going to look very unprofessional when I have to contact them with a new account.

Direct banking is confusing, contradictory and has a very poor customer helpline.

Do not use this bank if you are a business and want a good service. Even when you try and complain you get absolutely no response whatsoever just passed around..........Customer Service Department a joke!!!

3 years good banking all going well till online banking went rong. Have been trying to sort out for 3 weeks been told I'm entering pin rong. Been told it's all my forte . Put in two complaints and no one returned a call in the 5 working days I was told they would. Now been told it will be 4 weeks. If you are trying to run a business do not get this so call business account from Natwest you will spend to much time trying to sort bank and worrying if it will work or not or if you will have to spend 1.45 minutes on phone to sort out problems and be told your not doing the very simple task right by the young girl doing her best to stay awake and get you off the phone. I do not have the time to sort this out as running my bisiness has to come first. Very poor service all round by the faceless natwest. 

I bank with both Halifax and Natwest. I use Natwest for my business account so I regularly pay cheques and cash into that account. On a number of occasions I've paid cash into Natwest and then transferred money to another account (with Natwest) only to be have a charge applied to my account. When questioned Natwest have stated that cash paid into your account isn't actually available until the following working day. I understand cheques take time to clear and they show on you account as 'money not yet available' but once my cash is in the bank then how can they justify a £30 charge for using cash? As a 'gesture of goodwill' they did transfer this money back to me after a number of phone calls. Really disappointing service and rude staff.

Seem to think that if they make a fundamental error the customer is there to provide a 'learning' (their words, not mine!)for their staff!! They are totally uninterested in the inconvenience the customer may have been caused.

Their complaints department do not have an easily accessible email address and the fax line is often engaged. The business manager just passes on requests to other departments but does not bother to ensure that these are carried out.

First tried to setup an account 3 months ago at my branch, was told they no longer have buisness managers in the branch. Tried to setup online, my application was lost. Tried to setup over the phone twice, the first time they never got back to me, the second time they did get back to me, and I thought I was making progress, but then all communication stopped. I rang them back again as was greeted by an angry employee of natwest that was annoyed that he had to try find my account details without a customer number. Launched and official complaint, I was assured my account setup would be fast tracked, a week goes by with no response and I have just rung them today and guess what they said they would get back to me ( a story I have now heard 10-12 times)....my account is still not setup today and I am left wondering what has happened to this bank? I have never had a problem with natwest up till 3 and a half months ago. Everything I have said here is 100% accurate, no spin, it's without doubt the worst customer experience I have ever dealt with in my life.

We have now closed the account after 6 years with Nat West. For the first couple of years not a bad service but in recent years there has been a serious deterioration. We had average credit balances of say £20,000 and yet no one bothered to offer reviews. The bank was however, very keen on taking excessive bank charges monthly. Recently we opened an account with Santander Bank They too had bad reviews but, so far, just the opposite. We have a Business Banker, telephone contact, email contact and much reduced charges. Surely, Nat West will wake up and get with the times and realise that good supportive service is far more 0f value that adopting a self centred, lazy, inefficient approach.

Business account - secured overdraft of £15k against property with £150k of equity.

Constant aggravation every year for renewal... seven years later, cancelled overdraft, without any notice... no emails, no phone calls... be warned I lost faith in NatWest a long time ago when was threatened by bank manager how will you pay your mortgages without your overdraft.... and so set up another account in case this happened!

Had a sensible bank manager then some idiot.

I sincerely regret choosing to move my business banking to a NatWest Direct Business Current account and Direct Reserve savings account. The application process took the best part of two months, during which time I was asked multiple times for the same information. Two months on I still don't have full online access to my accounts.

When the accounts were finally set up, NatWest failed to send me a customer number, meaning that I couldn't access my accounts. It took several phone calls (everything requires several phone calls, because NatWest say they will call you back, but they never do) before somebody could provide me with my customer id. A week after getting my customer id, NatWest changed it, without letting me know. It took several more phone calls to find out what had happened.

When I finally got online access, which involves sending a paper form and then waiting 3 weeks whilst they repeatedly try, and fail, to generate an activation code, I noticed that my Direct Reserve account was missing from online banking. Even more phone calls later I was told that the product had been discontinued and my account, even though I had been provided with the account number and told it was open, had been flagged as blocked. Of course, none of this had been communicated to me voluntarily.

I'm still waiting for a call back to explain whether my Direct Reserve account will be unblocked. I'm not going to hold my breath.

My only recommendation is to avoid this bank - you've got better things to be doing with your time than chasing up unreturned phone calls whilst trying to resolve NatWest's latest mistake that has left you with no access to your accounts.