've been on the phone for a lot of yesterday having had my ear burned off me by a friend.
On my recommendation (based on limited use of their online facilities, credit and debit cards) he opened a PostBank EveryDay account a few weeks ago.
He had a series of setup problems which delayed him using the account for close to three weeks (no PIN received, no Account details received, no electronic gizmo received, then three of them delivered on successive days all with an accompanying form letter with the same date) but eventually he seemed good to go. He used his Maestro card as instructed "in an ATM which must be physically attached to or in a bank" to activate it. This instruction struck him as so strange in its specificity that he made a note of it.
He set up a few "Beneficiaries" in his account using the bank-sort code and account number details supplied by his utility providers (gas, electricity, mobile-phone, broadband, landline, etc) and fired off a couple of payments to them. The following day his account history showed the transactions credited back to his account with the message "POSTBANK IRELAND REDIRECTED" appended to them.
He contacted the PostBank helpline and after investigation their backoffice personnel provided the information via the helpline staff that the sort-code details for the Beneficiaries in question were incorrect therefore the transactions were rejected and credited back against the originating account.
He deleted the Beneficiaries, re-checked the bank-sort code and account number details with his utility providers (they were identical) and set up the Beneficiaries again in his PostBank EveryDay account, fired in a couple of payments which were rejected on his account history as previously.
He contacted the PostBank helpline again and was given the same story, invalid bank sort-code, and that's when he rang me.
I got the utility account details from him and typed them into this - and they were returned as valid. I have the printed Beneficiary details he emailed to me and I took a screen-shot of my results from the IPSO website.
I rang the helpline for one of the utility providers with a "REDIRECTED" payment on my friend's account history (I'm a customer of this utility as well) and I was informed that they are not set up to receive online payments from PostBank but couldn't explain why. I was also told they don't take the PostBank Maestro card over the phone, but again they couldn't say why.
I relayed this information to my friend who rang PostBank and he was told “emphatically” that this was not possible and the information was untrue and that once the sort-code and account number were correct the payment would go through “automatically” - we already knew this was incorrect. I have since established that using the pre-printed Giro on the bottom of the statement you can in fact pay this bill over the counter in a post office.
So the situation from my friend's perspective is :
On my recommendation (based on limited use of their online facilities, credit and debit cards) he opened a PostBank EveryDay account a few weeks ago.
He had a series of setup problems which delayed him using the account for close to three weeks (no PIN received, no Account details received, no electronic gizmo received, then three of them delivered on successive days all with an accompanying form letter with the same date) but eventually he seemed good to go. He used his Maestro card as instructed "in an ATM which must be physically attached to or in a bank" to activate it. This instruction struck him as so strange in its specificity that he made a note of it.
He set up a few "Beneficiaries" in his account using the bank-sort code and account number details supplied by his utility providers (gas, electricity, mobile-phone, broadband, landline, etc) and fired off a couple of payments to them. The following day his account history showed the transactions credited back to his account with the message "POSTBANK IRELAND REDIRECTED" appended to them.
He contacted the PostBank helpline and after investigation their backoffice personnel provided the information via the helpline staff that the sort-code details for the Beneficiaries in question were incorrect therefore the transactions were rejected and credited back against the originating account.
He deleted the Beneficiaries, re-checked the bank-sort code and account number details with his utility providers (they were identical) and set up the Beneficiaries again in his PostBank EveryDay account, fired in a couple of payments which were rejected on his account history as previously.
He contacted the PostBank helpline again and was given the same story, invalid bank sort-code, and that's when he rang me.
I got the utility account details from him and typed them into this - and they were returned as valid. I have the printed Beneficiary details he emailed to me and I took a screen-shot of my results from the IPSO website.
I rang the helpline for one of the utility providers with a "REDIRECTED" payment on my friend's account history (I'm a customer of this utility as well) and I was informed that they are not set up to receive online payments from PostBank but couldn't explain why. I was also told they don't take the PostBank Maestro card over the phone, but again they couldn't say why.
I relayed this information to my friend who rang PostBank and he was told “emphatically” that this was not possible and the information was untrue and that once the sort-code and account number were correct the payment would go through “automatically” - we already knew this was incorrect. I have since established that using the pre-printed Giro on the bottom of the statement you can in fact pay this bill over the counter in a post office.
So the situation from my friend's perspective is :
- PostBank cannot (or will not) validate bank sort-codes / account numbers for their users (the helpline person he spoke to asked how he expected her to be able to control what he typed ??)
- PostBank cannot (or will not) generate meaningful messages for their customers in relation to rejected transfers to Beneficiaries
- PostBank helpline staff don't know what IPSO is (I checked) and have told me that IPSO has nothing got to with PostBank ( partially true - the relationship is indirect as PostBank is not a clearing bank )
- PostBank helpline staff seem to be just "parroting" scripts or responses from others and are not in a position to actually resolve problems customers encounter
- PostBank helpline staff are providing their customers with inaccurate information in relation to the cause of problems and their resolution