Santander - Too big for their boots

[martgoingmad]

Hello all,

After all the furore about Northern Rock and government bail outs as nobody noticed the power Santander now have over the UK finance market? Or is it just me?

Example:
Northern Rock straight after near collapse tried to take me to court and their advisors were very unhelpful and insisted I paid. After pressure from various sources i.e. DebtWizrd, Melaine (I think) etc. they started to relax their rules and remebered who owns them.

Santander buying up banks and finance houses in the UK refused to accept any offer of payment even from Payplan! I eventually gave them the car back even though I didn't have too but they still won't accept the Payplan payment.

I have noticed that a number of other posters have said they have had problems with Santander. Is this now a case of 1 company getting too big and also dare I say it not bothered about UK customers as they have no roots in the UK?

Sorry to rant but Santander have really wound me up over the last year. They weren't even bothered when I told them that teh collection agent was suppose to send my tax disc back and he didn't. It had 3 months on it.....

Open to discussion.....
Martyn

[Michael Peoples]

In fairness Santander are a huge outfit and some parts are easier to deal with than others. I do not think it is a policy and once the whole operation is completely merged there may be consistency of approach.

[GinSkipper]

Hi Martin,

Some interesting points you make there.

Santander are still behind the big players in banking terms and when categorised by total assets, they are the 15th largest bank. This is still significantly behind the biggest asset holding bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, which at $3,500,950,000.00 (3.5 trillion US $) is 2.4 times the size of Santander!

How do people find RBS by comparison?

I also think that Santander are very interested in the UK financial consumer market, which is obvious by their continuation to buy in to this market space e.g. Abbey, B&B etc... So it's probably fair to say they are just disorganised and still to impliment the revised policies the goverment has been asking from banks. [;)]

Cheers

Andy