My online banking access keeps getting blocked by Santander for no explicable reason.

This is the disingenuous message from the Santander online banking website…

“For security reasons”… so did I get my credentials wrong? No.

Did I do something bad? No. I tried to move money between my accounts.

Highly suspicious! Except it’s the same amount moved between the same two accounts at around the same time every month. Santander’s algorithms clearly suck.

“Let us help you” – wow, that’s really something… Santander, you could help me by not blocking my account access. You could help me by answering the phone occasionally so it doesn’t take me 40 minutes to get through to someome who can merely start the long process to unblocking account access sometime before tomorrow. That’s my access to my money.

Then, ultimately, you could help me by not playing a jingle purpose-designed to irritate whilst interspersing it with a recorded voice telling me “I’m very sorry to keep you waiting”. The recorded voice clearly isn’t sorry at all. Santander isn’t the least bit contrite or they’d handle complaints properly and fix things so these problems never happen again.

Santander should:

  • not block account access for no reason
  • put sufficient people on the job to answer complaint calls
  • pay compensation when they get it wrong… Except that’d be so often they’d be bankrupt within months.

I genuinely feel sorry for the staff who have to handle calls from frustrated customers. I have absolutely no doubt that they, personally, are genuinely sorry this happened, and that they’re doing everthing in their power to rectify the problem. Except they’re not empowered, and are representing a company with terrible management, over which the customer-facing staff have absolutely no control or influence. No wonder Santander doesn’t have enough people left to handle customer calls within a reasonable time. Morale must be so low.

Anyway, if you’d prefer for this not to happen to you, don’t even consider switching your banking to Santander. We originally switched to Santander for better service than we were getting from Barclays. But over time the quality has eroded and evaporated. The recent (post-2018) experience we’ve had is just appalling, over and over again. We’re voting with our feet and so should anyone who’s had this experience.