They transferred £2000 out of my account randomly one day with no cause or explanation when there was £118 available in it. The next day they froze the account and a specific contact at HSBC forced me to make a repayment arrangement for the money. I refused and opened a dispute and it took me 14 months to get it back and all fees incurred for entering an unarranged overdraft. It ruined my credit rating for 3 years. Every contact I made with them was handled by someone utterly incompetent or disinterested in solving the problem even when I involved a solicitor.
Never an apology, never an explanation, never a true resolution.
NEVER work with HSBC. ALWAYS keep your finances distributed between multiple accounts.
With Santander mostly now who so far, touch wood, have succeeded in not fucking anything up. Halifax as a backup.
So I did that and the way HSBC helped me was to immediately cancel all my cards so I was left high and dry. Since my problems had only just begun I realised my credit record was still good and opened an account with Barclays the next day who were more than happy to issue me cards and a line of credit.
The moral of this story is that if you have financial problems do not tell your bank.
So if you have the type of financial problems where you need money-right-now but have some good future-money to offer in exchange, they'll be glad to help you make a deal (and vice versa for investments), and you should absolutely talk with your bank about such problems.
However, if you have the type of financial problems where both money-right-now and future-money are lacking, then yes, no bank is going to be helpful there.
always get biten in the hand, when the bank you trust with 90% of your savings decides to lock your account or wtv
never again, keep it distributed as much as possible
I had no problems, opening the account online and only showing up to the branch for the final papers, but I had that NINo paper. Maybe you chose the "wrong" banks? Some like Lloyds are much more accommodating to immigrants and have few requirements.
Walked across the street to HSBC and all they needed was a letter from my employer and I had my account in a few hours.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/financial-pr...
Sadly, Boris fixed this for the UK.
The effect? Less than ten thousand basic accounts existed in 2020, two years after their introduction. (source in Polish: https://serwisy.gazetaprawna.pl/finanse-osobiste/artykuly/14...)
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/basic-bank-account...
Things are a lot easier now with IBAN though, and a bank account is less of a hard requirement than it was 15 years ago.
Not sure I see a difference?
In most cases, unless you bounced a check (There is a separate system banks use on checks. It not tied to credit agencies.) you can get an account by walking in with any check, or money, though.
Many of our poor are stuck with Payday, with their outrageous fees.
Some homeless shelters offer p.o. boxes. Very few sadily.
All the Covid fun money blown out of tee shirt bazokas to fraudsters, and big healthy businesses; none went to people without an address. None.
ChexSystems is a credit agency. They just specialize in one data point (as of now).
This is a direct consequence of there being no official central registration of one's address in the UK, unlike in many other countries. You might call Austria bureaucratic for example, because you have to register within 3 days of moving (and another registration is necessary within 4 months), but then you get official papers that prove your address, so this never becomes an issue here, unlike in the UK.
I just checked, and for healthcare you don't actually need it in the UK. In other EU countries you usually have to pay health insurance for yourself if you are not working (sometimes a LOT of money), but not in the UK.
I also helped a friend who just arrived in the UK. The procedures are completely circular. You need a proof of address to open a bank account but you need to have a bank account to do anything that will give you a proof of address.
As for natwest their account opening procedure involves printing a blank pdf form, filling it by hand and going to the branch with it. Welcome to 1999!
Don't take this personally, every Barclays customer experiences random error messages as an everyday benefit of banking with Barclays. The only good thing I can say is that they still have physical branches where you can walk in and talk to a person who is usually nice and helpful.
It was months of back and forth before they finally told me that I had offhandedly mentioned my salary and they wanted proof of that. Despite never needing proof before, and despite them being the bearer of my bank account so they could see this. I had to refuse to leave the HQ on Fleet Street for 4 hours before they even told me that.
They wouldn’t accept my payslip pdf as proof. So I walked across the street to Barclays and opened 3 accounts on the spot and never looked back.
Ironically to this topic, I had to close that account when I left the UK because I didn’t have a UK address. But HSBC handled my case really badly, I nearly lost my accommodation because of their opaque stalling (I need to prove direct debit before move-in). So I would never go back.