Mild rant about Citibank.....
Discussion
Been with Citibank 20 years, have an account in New York, due to working offshore. Never had a problem until about 4 years ago, when they decided their instant wire on line transfers needed a texted code sent to your mobile to allow you to process a wire. Great, except you can't send a wire if you don't have a phone, like on a ship.... and don't have a US mobile phone....and aren't IN the USA......
Hours spent on the ships satellite phone trying to work around it, with numerous transfers within Citibank....all requiring verification of identity, all with the looooong quiet minutes while they do their mails or go for a coffee. They could not resolve it for me.
But they relented and a few weeks later they changed their system, so people like me could actually use the normal three day wire system.
Now, over the last weekend, they have changed THAT too! Now they need to send a code, except I don't have a number registered with them that can be texted to. So I called them, 'toll free international number' line, and after 20 minutes the 'toll free' line chewed up all £20 of credit on my mobile and cut me off seconds before I got sorted out.
So I went out and bought a Land line plug in phone, so I can call them, plugged it into our new Virgin phone socket, it don't work........ 15 minutes on the phone and an engineer is coming out..... next week........
I was about to bid on a bike on Ebay, but wont have the cabbage in the bank to pay for it until I can sort $hittybank out.
Hours spent on the ships satellite phone trying to work around it, with numerous transfers within Citibank....all requiring verification of identity, all with the looooong quiet minutes while they do their mails or go for a coffee. They could not resolve it for me.
But they relented and a few weeks later they changed their system, so people like me could actually use the normal three day wire system.
Now, over the last weekend, they have changed THAT too! Now they need to send a code, except I don't have a number registered with them that can be texted to. So I called them, 'toll free international number' line, and after 20 minutes the 'toll free' line chewed up all £20 of credit on my mobile and cut me off seconds before I got sorted out.
So I went out and bought a Land line plug in phone, so I can call them, plugged it into our new Virgin phone socket, it don't work........ 15 minutes on the phone and an engineer is coming out..... next week........
I was about to bid on a bike on Ebay, but wont have the cabbage in the bank to pay for it until I can sort $hittybank out.
swerni said:
I attempted to open a business account with them this week, no one could actually tell me who to speak to.
The ones that were able to were not allowed to.
Never deal with such a stupid organisation.
I've spent about six hours on the phone in the last week, trying to get some money wired over. First I remembered I had to change my address and phone numbers, so, I did that.The ones that were able to were not allowed to.
Never deal with such a stupid organisation.
Then I went in again to see what would happen, and instead of asking me if I want a code sending, it just said 'enter your code'.
I checked if they have my details right. No phone number showing up, just a little spinning 'loading' circle. Continually...
More phone time, one girl finally admitted they can't actually send the phone codes outside the USA. Great.....
30 minutes, numerous transfers, finally got to a machine that would give me a code over the phone: it spoke at normal speed, a ten digit number, replete with background hisses and static. I had it repeated fife times, thought I had it, then the machine hung up on me.
No, it was the wrong code.....
Back on the phone, several transfers, the usual repeated security checks, finally got to a girl who would simply get the code and tell it to me.
It worked! Hallelujah!! I wired £20,000 over so I don't have to deal with them f
king idiots again any time too soon!And today I got my tax declaration rejected for the third time in a row, they wrote me a generic letter stating
: the 8BEN form was not filled out to their satisfaction, OR, the signature did not match the one on record, OR, the passport or driving license was not correct, OR, my country of residence was not filled in correctly.
Same as the last two times. The f
king halfwits can't even manage to generate a letter telling me exactly what I am doing wrong on their fking form???If its any consolation, Barclays are exactly the same for me in reverse, every time they update their app, it automatically disables the previous version, meaning I have to use their pin sentry machine to generate a new code to log back in, but wait, they also need to send a code via text, which can only go to a uk number.....not a lot of good to me in Toronto...!!
King Herald said:
Been with Citibank 20 years, have an account in New York, due to working offshore. Never had a problem until about 4 years ago, when they decided their instant wire on line transfers needed a texted code sent to your mobile to allow you to process a wire. Great, except you can't send a wire if you don't have a phone, like on a ship.... and don't have a US mobile phone....and aren't IN the USA......
Hours spent on the ships satellite phone trying to work around it, with numerous transfers within Citibank....all requiring verification of identity, all with the looooong quiet minutes while they do their mails or go for a coffee. They could not resolve it for me.
But they relented and a few weeks later they changed their system, so people like me could actually use the normal three day wire system.
Now, over the last weekend, they have changed THAT too! Now they need to send a code, except I don't have a number registered with them that can be texted to. So I called them, 'toll free international number' line, and after 20 minutes the 'toll free' line chewed up all £20 of credit on my mobile and cut me off seconds before I got sorted out.
So I went out and bought a Land line plug in phone, so I can call them, plugged it into our new Virgin phone socket, it don't work........ 15 minutes on the phone and an engineer is coming out..... next week........
I was about to bid on a bike on Ebay, but wont have the cabbage in the bank to pay for it until I can sort $hittybank out.
Rule one of expatting, don't ever use a US branch of a bank. There is no upside. You will always be a victim to parochial and borderline facist mindsets. And it opens you up to all sorts of unnecessary political risks and ballbag behaviours like having your funds blocked. Plus, you have no protections and ultimately no rights. Hours spent on the ships satellite phone trying to work around it, with numerous transfers within Citibank....all requiring verification of identity, all with the looooong quiet minutes while they do their mails or go for a coffee. They could not resolve it for me.
But they relented and a few weeks later they changed their system, so people like me could actually use the normal three day wire system.
Now, over the last weekend, they have changed THAT too! Now they need to send a code, except I don't have a number registered with them that can be texted to. So I called them, 'toll free international number' line, and after 20 minutes the 'toll free' line chewed up all £20 of credit on my mobile and cut me off seconds before I got sorted out.
So I went out and bought a Land line plug in phone, so I can call them, plugged it into our new Virgin phone socket, it don't work........ 15 minutes on the phone and an engineer is coming out..... next week........
I was about to bid on a bike on Ebay, but wont have the cabbage in the bank to pay for it until I can sort $hittybank out.
So, in short, you should never have opened that type of account.
You open your dollar account with an overseas branch. Unless there is a taxation reason then you're always best to hold under a U.K. Banking license due to the capital protections you have.
CB are generally bellends anyway. Even with the UK operation you can smell the US style narrow mindedness and religious ferver and their systems are very clunky. You'd really only tolerate them for their ability to hold GBP, EUR & USD accounts for you and to operate them on one card but beyond that I think someone would be insane to go anywhere near them.
OP, I truly feel your pain.
I have been dealing with Citibank Uk for a few years, and was able to finally close my account (found an alternative through another bank) a month ago. I too work on ships and have the same issue with one time pass codes… I was so pleased to be free of CB that I had a night out to celebrate!
I should have known it was not going to go well when I originally applied by post. I live a long way from London so it was not practical to do this in a branch. I filled out, over a 10 week period of time, 4 sets of forms and sent them to the CB PO box for the purpose of written applications, and they claimed to have received none of them. I eventually had to get some help from a real person in a branch to open the account. I wish I never had though, they just got worse and worse. Now I am free. Seriously, it was like escaping being a Jehovah’s Witness or something like that!
I have been dealing with Citibank Uk for a few years, and was able to finally close my account (found an alternative through another bank) a month ago. I too work on ships and have the same issue with one time pass codes… I was so pleased to be free of CB that I had a night out to celebrate!
I should have known it was not going to go well when I originally applied by post. I live a long way from London so it was not practical to do this in a branch. I filled out, over a 10 week period of time, 4 sets of forms and sent them to the CB PO box for the purpose of written applications, and they claimed to have received none of them. I eventually had to get some help from a real person in a branch to open the account. I wish I never had though, they just got worse and worse. Now I am free. Seriously, it was like escaping being a Jehovah’s Witness or something like that!
paulguitar said:
I have been dealing with Citibank Uk for a few years, and was able to finally close my account
I closed my Citibank account a couple of years ago - they suspended my debit card without calling me, and then had to call the standard number to try to get it reactivated. Took 3 calls, and almost 2 hrs in total sitting on the phone to get it sorted.Since I closed it, I receive a monthly set of Citibank alerts emailed to me to tell me that my standing orders failed to process (Reason Code = "ACCOUNT CLOSED"). Have a filter to delete them as I can only imagine how long it would take on the phone to get them to sort this out.
DonkeyApple said:
Rule one of expatting, don't ever use a US branch of a bank. There is no upside. You will always be a victim to parochial and borderline facist mindsets. And it opens you up to all sorts of unnecessary political risks and ballbag behaviours like having your funds blocked. Plus, you have no protections and ultimately no rights.
So, in short, you should never have opened that type of account.
My company was merged with another, about 14 years ago, who insisted we all open Citibank accounts to get paid. After the last fiasco happened I stopped using them, but when I got laid off a year ago I had a large payout, and wiring it directly into a US account was by far the easiest route to take. Big mistake, but I thought they had finished trying to fSo, in short, you should never have opened that type of account.
k over as many of their customers as possible.Another example of the sheer bloody minded paranoia American suffer from: I loaned money from my 401k in the USA, and had to pay it back by paper cheque every month. There were unable to process wire transfers in this day and age.
I posted a cheque, every fking month, a Citibank cheque, no dramas....until the second to last payment. It was rejected, and after several long phone calls to the USA, which was answered automatically by machine, which would not allow me to move last the 'please state your social security number'... it turned out the cheque was rejected because I had written the cents below the line. On US cheques you have to write ' and 77/100' after you write the sum, to tell them 77 cents you were paying. It only fitted below the line.
"One thousand seven hundred and fifty seven dollars and 77/100" simply did not fit into the place left for it.
I then checked all my old cheque copies, on Citibank, where they keep a picture of the cheques, and every single fking one had been written the same way. Some fking jobsworth in the 401k department had decided to play powermonger after nearly four years! Assholes!
And the final cheque, to finish with the fkwits, it HAD to be a cashiers cheque, or managers cheque, not a normal Citibank cheque like I had been using! And when I inquired why it was thus 'that's the policy, sir, have a good day'....
FFS what is UP with those paranoid asshats??
I posted a cheque, every f
king month, a Citibank cheque, no dramas....until the second to last payment. It was rejected, and after several long phone calls to the USA, which was answered automatically by machine, which would not allow me to move last the 'please state your social security number'... it turned out the cheque was rejected because I had written the cents below the line. On US cheques you have to write ' and 77/100' after you write the sum, to tell them 77 cents you were paying. It only fitted below the line. "One thousand seven hundred and fifty seven dollars and 77/100" simply did not fit into the place left for it.
I then checked all my old cheque copies, on Citibank, where they keep a picture of the cheques, and every single f
king one had been written the same way. Some fking jobsworth in the 401k department had decided to play powermonger after nearly four years! Assholes!And the final cheque, to finish with the f
kwits, it HAD to be a cashiers cheque, or managers cheque, not a normal Citibank cheque like I had been using! And when I inquired why it was thus 'that's the policy, sir, have a good day'....FFS what is UP with those paranoid asshats??
It's not only Citi. HSBC are like that too.
Proclaim to be the world's bank, but you can never link accounts in different countries together.
I've a friend who now lives in Dublin. She's lived and worked in the U.S, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan over the years. Cleverly planning for her retirement she also has property in each country. Always banked with HSBC. They can not link anything together, so she has numerous cards from numerous countries, and no interweb banking to put it all together!
Contrarily, I use BIL in Luxembourg and their mobile and international banking is very good, holding EUR, CAD, USD and GBP with them - easier for business travel.
Proclaim to be the world's bank, but you can never link accounts in different countries together.
I've a friend who now lives in Dublin. She's lived and worked in the U.S, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan over the years. Cleverly planning for her retirement she also has property in each country. Always banked with HSBC. They can not link anything together, so she has numerous cards from numerous countries, and no interweb banking to put it all together!
Contrarily, I use BIL in Luxembourg and their mobile and international banking is very good, holding EUR, CAD, USD and GBP with them - easier for business travel.
But that's just common sense. Each jurisdiction is a different company under a different banking license and subject to different laws and regulation etc.
For the licenses set in places like the EU, GB or US there is enough demand for a few key overseas currencies so it's relatively easy to find an EU bank which will handle a few or the main currencies but it simply isn't cost effective to link them to some Asian currency in non commercial demand. Customers wouldn't pay what it would cost to run such structure of wholly unconnected and unrelated IT systems and regulatory disparities.
God knows why anyone uses operations with US banking licenses. The US is all piss and wind, all about shouting how ultra modern the technis and how great customer service is but behind the scenes its thousands of people shuffling tonnes of paper pre war style and they will always have a parochial attitude. A shop in NY is there to serve people in NY and fully orientated to deliver to those people. A chap from KL will get a crap service. It's like walking into a kebab shop and asking for chips, they might be able to do them but it's not what they are there to do so the chips might well be st.
For the licenses set in places like the EU, GB or US there is enough demand for a few key overseas currencies so it's relatively easy to find an EU bank which will handle a few or the main currencies but it simply isn't cost effective to link them to some Asian currency in non commercial demand. Customers wouldn't pay what it would cost to run such structure of wholly unconnected and unrelated IT systems and regulatory disparities.
God knows why anyone uses operations with US banking licenses. The US is all piss and wind, all about shouting how ultra modern the technis and how great customer service is but behind the scenes its thousands of people shuffling tonnes of paper pre war style and they will always have a parochial attitude. A shop in NY is there to serve people in NY and fully orientated to deliver to those people. A chap from KL will get a crap service. It's like walking into a kebab shop and asking for chips, they might be able to do them but it's not what they are there to do so the chips might well be s
t. I've been with Citibank UK for 20 years or so now. I can't recall exactly why I opened an account with them - I'd always banked with NatWest as my parents had banked with them, but had enough of NatWest and all the other High Street banks seemed just as bad.
Citibank have been pretty much perfect throughout - one blip when they moved their call centre from Barcelona to India, but that seemed to get quickly resolved.
Citibank have been pretty much perfect throughout - one blip when they moved their call centre from Barcelona to India, but that seemed to get quickly resolved.
The annoying part is we had to use Citibank, with a PBOE account, 'Personal Banking for Overseas Employees'. That was okay to to start with, but then that account was removed and replaced by some other name, and the whole thing has gradually gone down the toilet ever since. Citibank is designed for Americans, IN America..
King Herald said:
The annoying part is we had to use Citibank, with a PBOE account, 'Personal Banking for Overseas Employees'. That was okay to to start with, but then that account was removed and replaced by some other name, and the whole thing has gradually gone down the toilet ever since. Citibank is designed for Americans, IN America..
That's the reason you first opened the account but you chose to remain with an inappropriate bank. Take a moment out of struggling to drive down parked roads and all the other massive problems you've decided to encounter since you've been forced unwillingly to return to Blighty and change to a British bank that is designed to cater for British people who are living in Britain. Ie you. 
In short, dry your eyes and get a grip. You're here now so deal with it.
DonkeyApple said:
That's the reason you first opened the account but you chose to remain with an inappropriate bank. Take a moment out of struggling to drive down parked roads and all the other massive problems you've decided to encounter since you've been forced unwillingly to return to Blighty and change to a British bank that is designed to cater for British people who are living in Britain. Ie you.
In short, dry your eyes and get a grip. You're here now so deal with it.
Oh my god, and all this time the answer was right in front of me..... In short, dry your eyes and get a grip. You're here now so deal with it.
So, I guess I need to go call Citibank for a couple of hours and try to arrange to send my money's to my UK bank.
King Herald said:
And today I got my tax declaration rejected for the third time in a row, they wrote me a generic letter stating
: the 8BEN form was not filled out to their satisfaction, OR, the signature did not match the one on record, OR, the passport or driving license was not correct, OR, my country of residence was not filled in correctly.
Same as the last two times. The fking halfwits can't even manage to generate a letter telling me exactly what I am doing wrong on their fking form???
And now they have sent it again!!!!! Exactly the same letter, telling me I have filled something in wrong, or omitted something on the form!!!! : the 8BEN form was not filled out to their satisfaction, OR, the signature did not match the one on record, OR, the passport or driving license was not correct, OR, my country of residence was not filled in correctly.
Same as the last two times. The f
king halfwits can't even manage to generate a letter telling me exactly what I am doing wrong on their fking form???Namely "Missing country of citizenship. (No abbreviations)
So, is that meant to be United Kingdom, or England??????
Every time I have filled it in on a immigration document to the USA, I have to state United Kingdom. They have ordered us to do that. So that is what I put on the tax form. Should it be England????
ETA: Just been on 'Chat' with Citibank, apparently I need to fill in the full country of citizenship name as it is seen on my passport, so....
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Really? Seriously???
Edited by King Herald on Monday 10th April 14:09
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