Destroying Trust

Destroying Trust

Trust is a very fickle thing. It’s offered freely, but it will start to erode immediately at the first sign of danger. Repeated danger signals compounds to whittle it down to absolutely nothing.

My bank is systematically destroying any trust I have in it.

They have clearly got some form of overdraft reduction campaign ongoing, and are targeting people with overdraft facilities to get them to reduce their usage.

I say “people” because it’s not just me. It’s not a personal vendetta, it’s a broad marketing campaign that, from what I can gather, encompasses anyone who has an overdraft facility and uses it. That’s probably a hefty proportion of the 14 million customers they have in the UK right now. A quick look at the timeline of posts in the “I Hate Santander Bank” Facebook group should give you a flavour of how untrusted they are. Reddit threads are no different, and a quick Google search will also conjure up a series of upheld consumer complaints about their aggressive communications by the Financial Conduct Authority.

What Santander are perhaps not getting is that I’ve been consistently in and out of my overdraft since I started university, aged 18, and the Bank of Scotland helpfully offered me a £1000 facility, which I promptly spent on beer, like all good freshers.

For over thirty years, operating in overdraft has been normal to me. The banks taught me it was ok. No one from the student branch of the bank called me up in 1994 and asked me to calm down with my beer consumption. I just worked, paid my money in to the account regularly and we all got along nicely dipping in and dipping out as life required. They made money on the overdraft, I got access to the facility as required. It seemed like the perfect arrangement.

But now I’m part of the target market for their campaign to reduce the use of overdraft. I say campaign, but I’m using the term lightly. It’s more of a sustained assault by email. And it’s not personal. Others are receiving these emails too. Forums are lighting up with customers genuinely afraid their banking facilities are going to be pulled because the tone of the emails is so, well, aggressive.

Their latest email arrived with the direct order, written in red, instructing me to “Start reducing your overdraft use” before then going on to promise (sorry, threaten) that “You now need to take further action to reduce how you use your overdraft, if you don’t we may reduce or remove it”.

Alrighty, then.

Maybe they’ve used AI to write these emails. Who knows.

What do know is that I suddenly feel like I can’t trust them. And you should be able to trust your bank.

My husband has also been targeted in the campaign. I know this because I asked him if he’d received similar emails, out of curiosity. He had. And it was annoying him too. Actually, strike that, my usually mild mannered, non-sweary husband said “they are really pissing me off”. Anger, not fear.

We’re now both actively considering switching banks. We both feel Santander has become an unreliable banking partner. That’s quite an achievement for a major high street bank.

Their campaign has worked. But perhaps not to their advantage.

You see, we both have more than one current account. We learned years ago never to put your financial eggs in a single basket. So it’s as easy as flicking a switch for us to quickly change where our income goes. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do because Santander can no longer be trusted with my money.

I mean, if you are living with the constant verbalised threat that they may, literally, remove the facility at their whim, why on earth would you voluntarily put your regular monthly income into their bank? What a risk.

If someone repeatedly told you that they might kill you, eventually you’d come to believe them and fear the possibility that they might.

In time I will pay down my overdraft facility, just like they want me too, but in the meantime, I’ll be protecting myself by redirecting my income into another bank entirely. Then I will decide when they get income and it won’t be in nice monthly sizeable chunks like they’ve had before. And when that’s done, I’ll be closing the account for good.

As Santander likes to say, it starts here.