Triodos Bank didn’t end our banking blues. On the contrary, they just added insult to injury. On May 15, we received a polite email from them with the following message:

“Thank you for your recent application for a Triodos Bank account for Just Go Pink! LLP. Please accept our apologies for the delay in contacting you in relation to this matter.

Your application was considered in detail and regrettably it has been declined. While we appreciate the aims of your business, we identified that most of your business activity is based overseas and at present we can only offer accounts to organisations based in the UK. I have returned the personal identification documents sent to us and they should be with you in due course.

Thank you for your interest in Triodos Bank and we wish you every success in your business venture.”

What???! Why would a bank refuse an account to a business because they earn money in other countries than the country where they are based? That doesn’t make sense to us, so we wrote to them saying so, explaining even more about our business model, sending them once more our business plan, and referring them to our accountant in London. That was on May 16.

On May 25, we received the following reply:

“Resolving your complaint fairly is important to us
We wanted to let you know that we are still investigating your complaint made on 16 May.

Our aim is to provide you with a fair and reasonable outcome and our ongoing investigation is to ensure that we have all of the information to achieve this. We hope to be able to respond to you by 04 June.”

That got our hopes up. Firstly, they treated our response seriously: as a complaint even. Secondly, they were obviously looking into the matter in more detail, so surely, they would come to see the error of their ways and grant us a bank account after all. So we waited patiently.

Crushed hopes

The 4th of June arrived and we got mail. Unfortunately, not at all what we were hoping for. They stick to their point and deny us an account. First they write that they do not open accounts for organisations who do not have their base of organisation in the UK, and in the next paragraph they state that they acknowledge that we are a legitimate UK business, operating internationally. So what’s the problem? This just doesn’t make sense!

Yesterday, we contacted the Financial Ombudsman UK and asked them to review the case. That’s probably going to take a lot of time and we cannot afford to wait any longer. Because we need a bank account to connect to PayPal and Stripe in order to launch Ananda.

A live chat with Daniella from HSBC

So on June 5, I contacted HSBC again. By chat this time, since that seems to be the best way to connect to them. It’s not easy, but I managed to establish a live chat with Daniella. After the initial getting-to-know-each-other was over, she informed me

“I can see that the review has been completed on your application and the application is currently with our internal Account Opening Department undergoing the necessary finalising checks before the account is agreed.
I can only apologise for the amount of time that this has taken but what I can do is put your details through to our Business department here as an escalation.”

Please do! So she did. And then she wrote that she had to schedule a phone call with us, so we agreed that HSBC would call us on the 8th, between 12 and 13 hours.

I kept my phone with me all day, but nobody called or tried to call. Unfortunately, we weren’t really surprised, based on prior experience. But this time, we weren’t going to wait passively for HSBC to move, so the next day, I contacted them again through live chat.

A live chat with Minna from HSBC

This time, I got Minna on the other side of the line. It took her a really long time to pull up our information, but when she finally got back to me, it was with good news. They decided that they do not need any more information from us (duh!), so our application is moved on to the final stage. And that means that HSBC will send us an email within a maximum of 5 working days, with instructions how to activate our bank account. Which, according to Minna, we can do immediately, and we can then use the account straight away.

The tension rises

This means that by next Friday (3 days from now) we will finally have a bank account. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that this time, HSBC is actually going to do what they said, and it all works out for us.

We started the application in February, which makes it 4 months now. We do not dare count on it yet, but our hopes are certainly raised!