Just before Christmas, I closed my Barclays Bank accounts and moved to Nationwide. We had a mortgage with them, which I paid off in 1998. I also had a couple of saver accounts with them and I left a pound in each. Nationwide found those and opened them and they showed up on-line. Both had a few pounds in them, in accumulated interest. But the rates for those particular accounts were around 1%. So I transferred the money to the current account. They've both been showing zero for a couple of months. Today, I opened a regular saver account with Nationwide, as it pays a good rate of interest. I tried to close the redundant accounts, but I couldn't do it on-line and when I phoned, I was told I'd have to go into a branch to close them. Which I did this morning. The girl in the branch said, "I'll close them and I'll transfer the money in them to your current account." I said. "There shouldn't be any, it's showing zero in both, when I go on-line." She replied with a smile, "Well there is, there's 4p in one and 1p in the other." When I got home I checked on-line and I could see that she had!
Riley— I could follow your story about the bank, until the very last sentence. You could see that she had…what? Dealing with banks and other institutions can be a headache here as well. I am still waiting for my hair to grow back.
Over here a lot of banks won't actually close an account. They'll tell you they closed it but they don't. They keep it with no money in it so that they can add it to the number of actually active accounts total so that it looks like they have more patrons using the bank than they actually have.
