Tits or face?

Dear Christopher Dunn (or the poor sap that copies and pastes standard paragraphs from an MS Word document on behalf of Christopher Dunn)

“Please note that the Bank has now introduced an annual review of all our customer’€™s formal limits. This provides us and you with the opportunity to consider whether your formal limit is still appropriate to your borrowing requirements. Formal limits will now last for a maximum period of 12 months.

Your formal limit has been reviewed and expired on 10 December 2009. However, the Bank has agreed to offer you a new facility after this date.

Should you wish not to have the limit renewed on your account, you were required to contact us before the expiry date. As we did not receive any objections on this matter, the limit has been automatically renewed.

In accordance with the Bank’s Personal Banking Terms and Conditions and our Fair Fees policy, we will not charge an arrangement fee, provided within the last six months we have not agreed to a request from you for a formal or informal overdraft.”

Perhaps HSBC have a different dictionary to me. Perhaps you operate in Oppositeland, a magical world in which up is down, black is white and fair means shafting customers at every opportunity. Perhaps these charges are unfair and perhaps you know it but can’t legally admit it.

If you’re going to introduce a new service like, I dunno, an annual review service for £25 a pop, you shouldn’t automatically default all of your customers to the payable option. If I recall correctly, the only time I’ve ever asked for a review of my overdraft was last December (You can read about that in my previous complaint and laugh heartily at your very understanding and not-remotely-cold response) so why would I start wanting an annual review for money? Did you ever read the story about Facebook updating everyone’s privacy settings? Allow me to elaborate. Facebook recently made an update to their service so that all of their members (approx 350 million people) suddenly had their most private and personal details (mobile numbers, photos of kids; that kind of thing) available to anyone (ex-partners, paedophiles; that kind of thing). They advertised this change as a really great new service update that everyone should drop to their knees in readiness to recieve the founders of Facebook for. Understandably people went nuts. Control of something they perceived as theirs was taken out of their hands. See a parallel? Understand my ire?

I suspect not.

And where does this £25 come from? Is this the same system you use to calculate your “fair” overdraft fees (how much did it cost to pay off OFT, eh?). Is this an accurate reflection of the actual cost to HSBC to perform the review? Is it a person reviewing my account? If so, how much do they charge and can I have a job? I’ll do the same for half. Or is it, as I suspect, completely automated? You know, wiv computers for nuffink an’ that?

I know it might blow your mind to read this but your terms and conditions are quite a dry read and as much as I’d like to be able to run updates to those T’s & C’s past my solicitor, I don’t really have the resources. I’m pretty much occupied with making sure my bills get paid. I know it’s your job to make sure you’re up to date with your bank’s services but it isn’t mine. I want to know what’s going in and what’s going out; that is all. Again, I know this might confuse you but this is, in reality, what the rest of humanity are like. We don’t care about updates to our bank’s small print. We don’t see an annual review of overdraft limits as a lovely present that we should be oh-so-grateful for. In the current climate, a lot of people would like to see banks burned to the ground and bankers jailed for fraud.

I don’t expect you waive this charge. If you have an ounce of humanity left in your soul you would but my faith is somewhat lacking. If you do decide to fleece me again, I only ask for one thing. That you take the £25, convert it into 2,500 1p pieces and eat every single one of them

Your new bestest friend.

Daniel ‘Sarcasm is a virtue’ Blackett