HSBC online banking review
Ever since my 18th birthday I have used HSBC and until recently I never found a single fault with their service. Not long after my 22nd birthday around three weeks ago I closed my HSBC because of several problems that took me at-least a week to resolve and had to make at-least 15 phone calls and visit my local branch 4 times! This in my eyes is unacceptable and extremely poor quality of service for an Internet banking issue.
Small print under the agreement of your account is always an issue with banks, and as you might expect there are a few rules that may seem a little unfair however they are sometimes necessary. HSBC allowed a stranger to pay in a large amount of money into my account and then took it back out with my permission! Before they took the money out, I had spent a small percentage which meant when they took the money back without permission I was overdrawn! Ok so they can take the money back if it isn’t mine however they had the cheek to charge me for going over drawn which was actually more than the amount I was overdrawn.
HSBC are most likely continuously resolving similar problems daily across hundreds of accounts however they never saw any urgency in unlocking my internet banking which caused more problems for me to transfer money to resolve the overdraft. Overall I had to pay back interest basically because they couldn’t understand the problem and why my online banking was locked. Over the course of the week in branch and on telephone all told me that it was for different reasons and claimed it would be unlocked within an hour.
Although branch staff are not very well trained and the phone staffs’ accents are hard to understand, the Internet banking is a great service, layout and navigation are perfect, account information accurate and security is spot on with great detection systems. Unfortunately call centres have endless international numbers with staff that barley speak English and they don’t know anything about the Internet banking system or why it chooses to lock itself. The security is great and very reassuring however if you have 4 or 5 transactions adding up to 1 thousand pounds or more it is very common for your account to be locked just incase it’s not you.
Overall I closed my account because HSBC allowed someone from HSBC to misplace money in my account, take it out without making me aware, and then charge me for going overdrawn. HSBC can be reliable in areas of Internet banking and have many flaws in others, no access to a branch with a problem such as mine could have cost me a lot of money which shouldn’t happen, HSBC is not the best Internet banking option online from my experience.