Abbey IT upgrade 'chaos' hits small biz banking

Abbey Business Banking

Even if you get in, as of today you cannot use any of the estabished bill payments, transfer from current to reserve and vice versa or set up new payments to suppliers etc. All you can effectively do is to see you account. This is now linked to my own personl account login and so so from a secrity persective,if anyone get's mylogon data, they can have access to both my personal and business accounts - great! You can no longer see how much interest you have accrued and they can't even tell you that. They say that you should ever have been able to transfer between accounts and that this was an error. Howeverif you look at their web-site and the reerve account, it says transfer can be made via telephone banking and e-banking! It's a complete mess and they can't understand the problem they have generated from waht was a decet service. My money is moving to Lloyds TSB in the next few days. A colleague of mine says he has also lost his direct debits and had one payment bounced already.

Fail fail

Anyone else getting cheesed off with people augmenting their derisory comments with the word 'FAIL'?

I've no idea where this phenomenon originated (possibly a school yard somewhere in the USA).

terrible

Abbey's internet "banking" is absolutely shocking. Other banks offered better internet banking on personal accounts 8 years ago. I don't think Abbey's programmers have ever used one of their competitors' services or they'd see just how appaling their site is.

Many banks have a memorable question and answer. So, when you log in, you are presented with your question "what's your favourite food", and you type in whatever the answer is. What I found mind boggling with Abbey is that they ask you to type in the question! You can imagine how easy it is to forget exactly how you worded it.

What's your favourite food?

What is your favourite food?

What's my favourite food?

What food's my favourite?

etc.

How on earth are you meant to get it exactly right? The only way I ever logged in was to type in garbage a few times until it presented me with a different security prompt.

If anyone knows how to send Abbey a complaint email please let me know. Their contact details don't give any means of writing to the internet banking department and all the usual suspects (webmaster@ etc) bounce back.

Abbey not just crap at business banking

I'm not surprised - I suspect they've been "upgrading their systems" for months now, in an effort to complete the merge into Santander. My joint account was completely messed up, with randomly cancelled cards, 45 minute phone hold debacles, customer service inadequacies, cards issued with incorrect names and to the wrong person... they even hung up on me during one fraught day where I rang them 4 times in total before I spoke to someone who could help at all.

Abbey national are a pathetic excuse for a high street business, let alone a bank. They deserve to lose every last one of their customers, not least as their ability to clear up their own mess is limited, to say the least.

My condolences to anyone who still banks with them. I do not.

P Hunter

I have been unable to log into my Abbey Account for 3 days now.

The call centre staff have been next to useless.

After 3 hours on the phone to them I have been told that I will have to wait until next week before I can access my account.

Par for the course with SHAbbey

Abbey are the absolute worst bank out here.

Their IT rollouts invariably lead to days of downtime, long queues at branches or interminable hours on the line to offshore imbeciles incapable of deviating from their queue cards or tying their own shoe laces.

I was sincerely glad to get shot of them after getting a number of gift baskets as apologies for poor service (including their call centre failing to transfer a large sum of money for me).

My wife has stuck with these jokers so I am still forced to deal with them occasionally, and go through the bliss of queuing for 15 mins (average) to speak to a spotty teenager who invariably has to talk to the middle aged mumsy woman who is besieged on all sides by the other spotty employees.

You can tell a lot about a companies business processes when their branches have signs everywhere saying they don't tolerate physical or verbal assaults on staff, I haven't seen another bank that felt the need to display such signs so prominantly

Unfortunately I moved to Alliance & Leicester who have also now been taken over by the dreaded Santander, and while A&L have been brilliant I am watching them like a hawk for any sign of the rot setting in.

Multiple failures

Just got off the phone after waiting 30 minutes to get through.

No access to one of my accounts after going though their new signin process, new login details in the post.

Can't pay in cheques/cash at the ATM's, this has been down all week but they hope to fix it in the next 2 days

Firefox 3 is "unsupported" so I switch to dreaded IE and get SSL certificate is invalid, very reassuring on a banking website!!!

abbey screw up

Very very angry about this mess. I cant move over 50k of money out of my reserve account and I've got a VAT bill to pay at end of december. Good job job I've got some money in the current account but will I be able to pay HMRC? No guessing for what HMRC will say if I cant or dont pay that bill!

Thing is, abbey should have seen this coming. They had a similar problem with the personal on line banking system a few years ago. When I complained then, I even offered my services as an experienced test analyst to put it right.

I'll be closing the abbey account asap and moving to the FSB's business banking option with the Co Op Bank.

Good work abbey!

Lies, Lies and even more lies

Monday: after waiting four hours - told that it would all be back to normal tomorrow

Tuesday: Was told that you can no longer transfer between accounts using the internet - This is the new policy - Use Phone or go to a branch. Made a complaint - Somebody will get back to you.

Wednesday: Yes, Yes you cannot transfer between accounts - Don't ask me it's what we have been told to tell you.

Thank you Abbey - Try to charge us for being overdrawn in one account because you changed the rules -WITHOUT WARNING!!!

Guys, guys, it's only money

Relax.

What's the big deal?

Just Change Banks

I was with Abbey, well Abbey National as it was, service got progressively worse, then they got taken over by Santander and they went down the pan.

Changed banks, dead easy these days, I even got paid for doing so.

Check out GreasyPalm for the best deal.

You could even make me some money by using my referral code.

http://www.greasypalm.co.uk/r/?l=802475.

I wouldn't recommend Alliance and Leicester despite the 100 quid they are offering as they are now owned by Santander as well.

Getting Really Silly Now.

Like everyone posting on this forum I'm getting tired of the mis-information.

I spoke to the business banking help-line last night (Wed) at 21:30 and was told very positively that a reboot of the servers at midnight would solve all of the problems. Guess what, tried this morning and still cannot pay bills or transfer money.

I am a small business and manage my bank accounts, supplier payments, STAFF WAGES etc on a just-in-time model, I need daily access to these accounts in order to function. This is really hurting my business at a time when we are all struggling to see where next years business is going to come from. I don't need this diversion Abbey !

Can someone please try and get some information out of Abbey as to what is really happening.

Bad IT Practices

Seems to me there was a failure of having any procedures so that if a problem was to occur then a fall back plan would be initiated. By the looks of things it was a really bad day for someone. And no doubt there will be a lot of lesson learned meeting going off. .......Like who's head shall we chop off.

The FULL scale of the problem with Abbey IT upgrade

Following the upgrade, Abbey made impossible money transfers from Reserve Account to Current Account. To resolve the problem, they're quoting wrong (Personal banking) number, and on the Business number noone replies.

Worse still, Abbey has deleted ALL our standing orders, including PAYE tax payments due this week.

We were in the proces of moving out from Abbey anyway, after they raised THREEFOLD currency conversion charges 4 months ago (EUR to GBP was 0.8%, is now 2.75%), without notice of course, and not publishing them anywhere (hidden charge). I complained and got whitewash.

We will sue Abbey for the difference in conversion charges (stlg150+ every month!), as soon as our account is moved.

Do NOT bank with Abbey, unless you want to lose lots of time and money.

It's highly frustrating

Yes, I'm adding my weight to the old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Compared to other banking websites, the Abbey 'interface' was at times cumbersome, but it worked. A little like my Nationwide account, which was also 'upgraded' and they introduced that pointless 'Credit Card Calculator' to generate some authorisation code to transfer money out of Nationwide. Pointless, and not fun. Considered moving accounts, but figured the devil I knew was better. Seems this is coming home to roost with Abbey. Was also quite happy, but in recent weeks the whole of the world's banking systems seems to have hit meltdown, when everyone realised all the numbers on the balance sheets were vapour.

FAIL - you ain't seen nuthin' yet............

Even more still down....

Trying to modify my accountants' standing order due to Gordon Browns marvellously pointless and expensive VAT change, and I can't do it via the website (after the tortuous, misleading and downright wrong changes), and I can't get through on the phone after 20mins at 20:45?

Idiots, idiots, idiots. I can see me switching accounts very soon.

Helpfully they've got some information on their front page that says "some customers" are experiencing problems and they are fixing it. Great, I feel so much better.

For the love of god...

How long has this been? I can't even get to the damned abbey business website let alone log in and find out what they've buggered up. And I actually do need in. D:

Abbey Business Banking ... Arhhh....

Its now Sun 14th Dec and the system is still down, made more frustrating that you can log on succssfully only then to see the message saying system down. What is going, does anyone else have same problem....

I thought it was just me

I thought this was just me. Or at least, that's what I was told.

Add me to the 0.001pc of affected users.

(I've blogged about this issue, but for the sake of spamming I won't post a link here)

Abbey IT help is nonsense

With regard to Abbey's Technical Help page:

It offers a link to download IE 6 - leads to IE 7 download:

It offers a link to Firefox 2 - leads to Firefox 3 download.

FF3 is an unsupported browser.

What is all this nonsense?

"Not lost transactions" - they have lost 2 of mine

Same problems, an hour on the phone last Tuesday, 40 minutes today.

I can't move money between accounts any more and it has lost some payments that I have made (for which I have the transaction numbers!).

Not only that, they told me last week it would all be fixed, this week I am going over the same ground and they don't even have a record of it...

I was thinking of moving my account anyway for the following reasons:

1) A Standing Order to Cahoot (another Santander bank so within the same group) takes two days instead of the one day a Payment takes (try it!)

2) Transfer more than a set amount to Cahoot (a low number of thousands) and the money takes much longer to arrive so that they keep the interest

3) Letter to Customer Centre ignored, so letter to CEO, c/o Head Office ignored

Certainly no way I am keeping it now!

Abbey Business Account - what a joke

For over a week the Abbey business banking (which is 100% online) has had faults, following a system upgrade. I have not been able to pay suppliers, and am on hold typically for 1-1.5 hrs each time i call. I am about to move to lloyds, and am more than happy to pay the £5 a month service charge. Abbey is free....so you pay for what you get.

WARNING - DO NOT BANK WITH ABBEY BUSINESS AT THE MOMENT - ITS A DISASTER ZONE.

Abbey business account - A Complete joke

It was working yesterday and then i logged in this afternoon and got the no cards linked to the account error.

Just spent 45 mins waiting for someone to answer who asked some questions before putting me on hold and then coming back on to say they had requested a new personal id and it would take 14 days to come through the post.

I said this is not acceptable as i never requested a new id, i was told to call the business banking number in the morning as he was just helping out.

when i asked who i complain to i was put on hold and then the line went dead.

What a joke, as a new customer and this being my first time using the account i wont be hanging about long and will be moving to another bank

Abbey are giving me the runaround

So I got my new Passcode and Registration number today.

And duly tried to log in . Totally failed.

After ringing the Freephone number 0800 056 5151 and getting my Personal ID confirmed I can only conclude that Abbey are trying to combine my 2 business account together.

So each time I log in I am entering the wrong details.

I ring up only to have my passwords reset again- letter in the post - AGAIN.

This is with me not realising this is perhaps resetting my other account.

I am going crazy and going round in circles.

I even suspect that my Norton Internet Security may be blocking access in some way to the Abbey Site.

A few days a go Norton reported "An intrusion attempt by www.abbeynational.co.uk was blocked: Risk Name HTTP Acrobat PDF Suspicious File Download. Risk Level High: ( I didn't try to download a PDF).

Is it just me? This was so easy before the upgrade.

And why am I asked for my entire ID and entire Passcode and entire Registration number rather than say 3 random digits from the security details. I I get a keylogger infection surelt I loose the lot. In what way is this a security upgrade?

What a shambles

It's reassuring that you bank, "update" their system and one of the steps is to ask for you for your: name, telephone and email. Errr.. shouldn't the system know this information!?

I've not got the same current account listed three-time on my screen but I can't move money from the reserve account to the current account as it's not "linked." Pity I didn't have three-times the money in the account!

What a shambles.