I’ve written about NatWest’s awful customer charter before (here and here).

Those with an exceptional memory might remember Pledge 9, often repeated in their ads:

We pledge to stay open for business if we are the last bank in town and will consider a range of options to ensure a local banking service is available.

You might have interpreted this to mean that they’d keep a branch open if it was the only bank in town. That would clearly have been foolish, as NatWest have now clarified, in response to a complaint about the closure of the Farley branch:

The commitment was to continue providing “banking services” wherever they were the last bank in town … Customers in Farley could still receive a full banking service from the Pudsey branch, just over a mile and a half away.

Yep, hosting a branch in a different town (Pudsey) is considered by NatWest to be providing a “full banking service” in Farley.

The ASA wasn’t impressed by this wriggling, and has promptly banned the ad for being misleading and lacking substantiation.

NatWest’s charter is awful, unstretching claptrap, and yet they can’t even keep to that. I wonder if this debacle will make it into the next “independent review”? Given that the complaint was about an ad based on the charter, rather than the charter itself, I’m confident it will be ignored.

As I always say in these posts: Swtich to Smile. Switch to First Direct. Switch to The Co-op.

Switch to anyone who actually gives a damn about customer service, instead of waiting for change for a bank which clearly doesn’t know how to prioritise customer service, and whose solution to poor customer service appears to commit to more poor customer service.

The more you put up with it, the more these corporate idiots think its acceptable, and the more poor service propagates.

Swtich, switch, switch!