Last year Abbey screwed up and caused me significant problems in my day to day BitFolk business. They were unable to convince me that they would improve in future, so I voted with my wallet and BitFolk sought another bank for business purposes. I had to keep the abbey accounts open though because some customers wouldn’t alter their standing orders etc. (even when repeatedly asked).

There were a few more incidents of poor service with Abbey, but I didn’t really care because the only thing BitFolk was using the account for was catching payments of people who were paying in unsupported ways.

A couple of weeks ago though, we moved business address. Changing addresses everywhere was quite annoying but would you like to have a guess which single organisation still has failed to accept a simple address change by now, one month after the move? The failing organisation is Abbey business banking.

Initially I went to the branch, figuring they’d need to do some form of security check (you’d hope). I was told that branches don’t deal with that and I had to write to them. So write I did, only to be sent back to the branch. Who then told me to write again and “make it clear they have to deal with it”. So write again I did.

I now have a letter from them saying that I really must go to the branch and produce all these documents (which is what I expected to do at first) and that until I do they’re going to send all correspondence to the old address. Which I now have no access to. I have no confidence at all that going to the branch again is going to get this sorted out. It’s an immense waste of my time, and now I have documents with sensitive information going to an address where some unknown people will receive them. Was I supposed to delay moving for months until one part of Abbey can work out how to communicate with the other part?

The easiest thing to do now seems to be to just close the accounts, and if anyone is still paying to the wrong place a year on then it’s going to have to be their problem. 🙁

I would strongly encourage anyone thinking of banking with this organisation to reconsider. You just can’t get anything done.