Barclays: More good news to come in 2010

I dumped Barclay's as my personal and business bankers when the sharply raised costs and started to give currency spreads reaching 3%.

As a Barclays Wealth customer I found that the so called service became shoddy almost as though they were deliberately holding up payments, It was not easy to get my money out.

If they are screwing their other customers the way they did me then the next results might be different. On one transfer they tried charging me £300+ for intermediary bank charges, I got it back by pointing out that I had specified to pay my cost only, the other bank charged £12 to recieve the funds.

My son worked for high street bank and said that personal banking for wealthy customers was regarded as a bit of a joke, they used exactly the same banking infrastructure as everyone else but just had a named person to talk to. (Just like a lot of business accounts). The bank regarded it as highly profitable and the customer as a load of mugs who didn't mind paying over the odds just to have a fancy chequebook with "private banking" or "Coutts" (RBS) written on the front. Although it said that you needed a high net worth for one of these accounts you might be surprised how many people have got them on fairly moderate incomes.

Thank you for confirming what I suspected about Barclays Wealth. My so called Manager seemed to be a bit of a twit, but I only hadsix figure amounts on my account, he kept trying to sell me investments at ridiculous management fees, the literature was aimed at the novice level of investor, it felt as though they were thinking that if they could cast the net wide enough they would pull in some rich dummies. £40 to transfer money with Barclays £23 with HSBC £25 with BS.

Quarterly charges jumped from £35 to £45 where with the others most are free.

I banked with Barclays for 25 years, I started with a feww pounds and was treated like a Lord now I have a lot more and get treated like SH1t.

FYX142