I understand that an easy way for banks to rebuild their balance sheets after a load of blokes who knew the price of everything and value of nothing have blown holes through them is to get the cash from their clients, but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept.
Anyone who has had the misfortune to ask me how I am recently has heard my rant about the service I’ve had from my banks, especially the difficulty of transferring money domestically and overseas.
My recent ravings at HSBC got a swift response and put me right on a couple of things. Apparently, I can make payments out of my EUR-business account online. “To clarify, it is possible to make a payment online in euros from your business account. However, it is currently not possible to make such a transfer from your foreign currency account. I am sorry this has not been fully explained previously. In order to make a euro payment online you have to arrange a transfer from your foreign currency account to your sterling account, and then make an international payment from this account,” the bank informs me. To me, that sounds like paying HSBC’s spread twice.