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Is Halifax a bank we're supposed to take seriously or just an angry old man



Applying for and managing complicated tax-free savings accounts these days is a doddle.


We’re 13% of the way through the 21st century and paying 0% tax on your nest egg has been made child’s play over the last few years. God bless the internet.


Even a revitalised state-owned behemoth such as Halifax, that by rights should have gone bust and vanished off the High Street in the late noughties, makes Isas easy with its state-of-the-art website and UK call centre.



Hellifax: A bank that requires you to visit the branch, check the website, write a letter and use the phone is like an old man at odds with the modern online world.

According to the Halifax website, you can easily...

• view accounts and balances
• pay bills
• apply for products.

If you want to apply for an Isa but are worried it may go wrong, there’s an Isa promise. A promise ladies and gentlemen!

And there’s more...

‘Online Banking,’ it says on the website, ‘is a safe and secure way to manage your money online.’ The future has arrived!

Technology has finally fixed our lives and sorting our finances is a simple stress-free joy. If only that were true.

All I wanted to do was check up on my junior Isa, open a new Isa and make some transfers into it. It's what banks do. Isas were invented in the previous millennium. They should be really good at it at by now.


Have you tried to deal with Halifax lately?

Dealing with Halifax is like being tutted at over the garden fence by a long-retired, angry old man who knows there's a modern world but can't quite understand or coordinate it because it's not like it was in the 1950s.

If you are thinking of transferring your Isa to the 1950s via Halifax please read this warning – because in spite of the Isa promise your Isa could be wrecked too.

The list of what you can and can’t do in Halifax would make the confused old man next door proud.

For example:

Do not try to transfer your existing Halifax Isa online. They may say you can when you telephone but you can’t, at least if you get the same treatment I did.

If the call centre AND branch staff insist that you should manage or upgrade your cash Isa online because you can, DON'T - because you can’t.

DO NOT hit the big TRANSFER button on the Halifax website. That’s the button next to your cash Isa account that allows you to transfer your cash from your old Isa to your new Isa using the menu included as part of the process. Because it’s not a TRANSFER. It’s a WITHDRAWAL.

It’s perhaps hardly surprising that dealing with a bank that's being propped up by the State isn’t going to be the smoothest of processes. I know, I should have known better. But it’s so confusing.



If you go to the website, the first thing you see is a big advert for a prize draw - it's a hugely attractive proposition and one that successfully lured me - buy it's perhaps a rather odd first impression of a cutting edge bank trying to reinvent itself as serious.


The first thing you hear if you phone - before being told you can manage your Isa online, which you can't, is an advert for the prize draw. It's as though Halifax has decided banking's too complicated and appointed itself the online replacement for, I dunno, bingo halls, which were another popular feature of the previous century.




Gimmicky mouse: Is a raffle the way to advertise a bank trying to be taken seriously? I should have known better when I opened a junior Isa, which you can't do online, obviously, and was asked if I'd be happy to help with staff training - only to sit through an insurance up-sell session - up there with some of the more admirable banking excesses. The interest rate I was given on the Isa was subsequently wrong.

I should have known better when I phoned the bank for help over some mysterious apparently missing money and was told that the call centre couldn't help, because that was a branch issue. But the branch couldn't help either. I'd have to wait for news by post.

I should have known better when the online Isa transfer forms don't allow you to fill in the name of your current provider if has more than two words in its name, such as First Direct, or if the account number doesn't follow the non-specified Halifax formula.

I should have known better. But I'm normal. I didn't.

Halifax had a three year-fix, which meant I could transfer my few quid from my few Isas and forget about it until there's a slim chance that interest rates may have a hope of rising again from 2016. Easy life.

I did what I was told in the branch and on the phone and on the website and transferred my current Isa into my new one. But it wasn't a transfer it was a withdrawal.

The call centre doesn't literally tut at you. But it does either cut you off [three times] or repeat your name at you over and over if there's a problem.

This is worse than being tutted at.

'Mr Browning, you manually transferred it Mr Browning, you should not manually transfer it because there's nothing we can do Mr Browning.'

'But you told me to. In the branch, on the phone and online.'

'Mr Browning.'

Then, some hope was thrown my way.

'Jordan,' said the call centre man, Jordan in the special Isa back office, who wouldn't speak to me, may be able to help put things back to how they were before the mistaken transfer that wasn't a transfer took place. I'd have to log in online to see if the secretive Jordan had been successful.

A few days later, I checked my online account. And things had been put back to how they were. Brilliant! Except they weren't.

I got a letter in the post from the Halifax, explaining how my special transfer out and Jordan's transfer back was the same as opening two Isas in the same year, which is illegal, and I'd have to phone to explain before they called in the tax man.

I phoned. And they said:

'Mr Browning.There's nothing we can do. There's maybe someone in the back office who can help. But you'll have to phone back.

'Mr Browning.'

Repeat and fade.

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