Anyone got an Alliance and Leicester current account?

[TheGreatSoprendo]

A&L have launched a pretty attractive current account deal which gives you a free overdraft for 12 months, plus they pay you £100 for opening the account, which can be increased by another £50 if you go through a cashback site like Quidco.

However, I have read a lot of complaints on the Money Saving Expert forum that suggests that their customer service is pretty poor. While, financially, the A&L account looks attractive, I don't want to switch if I'm just going to be signing up for a whole load of problems!

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has an A&L account and their experiences with them. Also interested in how good their online banking is?

[GTO Scott]

I'm looking at doing this too - Natwest have pissed me off too much and now I need 'another way'

Nationwide have a £75 cashback deal going on, I was wondering if it might be better to drop the £25 and take (hopefully?) better service with Nationwide.

[Rich_AR]

I set on up back in August, for the £100 cash, you need to put in over £500 a month. It takes upto 15 weeks from opening the account to getting the £100 credit.

Customer service is fine, no call centers in India and they answered the phone quickly.

To sum it up, I've had no issues.

[Chr1sch]

I had one, and now i dont.......

They are the most useless bank i have ever had the displeasure of dealing with. My student account was with HSBC, they were good and cust serv always great, but in india and i could never understand them (and vice versa)

I am now with Nat West who are great, local branch (who contact you if concerned about a transaction/overdraft issue etc)

I went over drawn with A&L for the grand sum of £3.17p, they proceeded to charge me £170 for the privelage...

Dont would be my suggestion

Edited by Chr1sch on Wednesday 14th January 13:50

[andye30m3]

A&L charged be for going a few pounds over my overdraft in the morning when a cheque was clearing in the afternoon, They always do debits first.

Phoned up to say i wasn't happy and they weren't interested, closed the account there and then and will never go back. I'm quite sure HSBC wouldn't have done this.

[chopper602]

I changed from an Abbey current account (bunch of twunts) to an A&L current account last year and have the free overdraft and 'was' getting 6% interest too. No problems with the bank at all. Haven't had a need to use any form of customer service and they also switched my account from Abbey to A&L. All very painless and efficient.
Web based banking is a bit unusual in the way it shows debits & credits and often processes ALL debits before credits are added (even though you know that the credit was the first to hit the account), which means you could go slightly overdrawn for a few seconds!