Complaints

To help us investigate and resolve your complaint, please make sure you include:

• Your name and address
• Your account details
• A description of your complaint and how you have been affected
• When your issue happened
• A contact number (or other preferred method of contact) and a convenient time to contact you.

Why do we need this information?

We want to be able to understand what has gone wrong. It is also really important that your complaint reaches the right person, who can investigate and fix the situation to get you back to the position you would have been in had the issue not occurred.

Your contact details will help us to get hold of you should we need to discuss your complaint, especially if we need any further information. Remember, calls from us may appear as unknown or withheld numbers.

We promise to do everything we can to resolve your complaint as soon as we receive it.

If we can resolve your complaint within three business days following the day we received it, we'll send you confirmation of this and we'll also let you know about the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) at this time.

For more complex issues we may need more time to investigate your concerns. If this is the case, we'll send you an acknowledgement letter outlining the next steps and when you can expect to hear from us. We will also give you a reference number should you need to contact us.

We'll keep you updated of the progress throughout our investigation. We may also need to contact you for more information and where possible, we will use your preferred method of contact. Remember, calls from us may appear as unknown or withheld numbers. We will then issue you with a final response which will outline the details of our investigation, how we reached our decision and what we are going to do to put things right. It will also provide information about the FOS.

We aim to resolve all complaints as quickly as possible and specific timescales apply to certain types of complaints.

Complaints relating to payments in or out of your account:

These include complaints about making or receiving payments on your current account, credit card or instant access savings account. 

• We’ll send you our final response as soon as we’ve completed our investigation. We have 15 days to resolve these complaints.
• If there are exceptional circumstances we may take longer than 15 days to investigate your complaint, we’ll however resolve all payment complaints within 35 days. We’ll write to you to let you know if we need longer than 15 days, we’ll also send you details about how to refer the matter to the Financial Ombudsman if you would prefer not to wait for us to finish investigating your complaint.

All other complaints:

• Although we have 56 days to resolve your complaint, we’ll send you our final response as soon as we’ve completed our investigation.
• We’ll also keep you informed in writing along the way so you’ll know when to expect to hear from us.
• If we haven’t been able to finalise our investigation by 56 days we’ll send you a letter letting you know and what steps you can take. These will include letting you know you can go to the Financial Ombudsman if you’d prefer not to wait until we’ve finalised our investigation.

If you employ a solicitor, claims management company or third party – e.g. a financial adviser – to handle your complaint, we'll investigate your complaint in the same way as when we deal with you directly. Please be aware that:

• we don't charge to investigate your complaint
• we're not liable for any fees you need to pay for a third party's services
• if we agree with your complaint and we make a redress payment, we'll generally only make this payment directly to you.