Yesterday, our banking blues finally ended. No thanks to HSBC, for we haven’t heard from them in a really long time. In my desperation, I got in touch with employees of HSBC through LinkedIn. One of them tried to help me. She gave me the name and email address of a Jane Doe who works in the department of new accounts.

Exit HSBC!

Jane actually called me. She asked a couple of questions and said that now, everything was finally in order and I would receive an email within 5 working days. As before, nothing came. So I emailed Jane. On the 3rd of July, she replied: “Your application is with our quality team and if they have any further questions regarding the application they will call you to discus any questions with you.”

Since then, nothing but silence from HSBC. Can you believe that? I’m guessing they don’t want new customers but don’t want to say so. Or maybe the British government is keeping the bank afloat. For any other business treating it’s potential customers in this way would have gone belly up a long time ago.

We’ve finally given up on HSBC and are not expecting to hear from them ever, but who knows!!! We still need a bank for payment processing with credit cards (Stripe) and hope some day they will find the time to send us the long overdue email they have promised us on several occasions.

Long live innovation (and PayPal)!

In the end, it is innovation at PayPal that saved us. For they have recently decided that they can accept virtual bank accounts.

So we applied for a business account with fire.com. And within 24 hours, it was up and running. We then entered the account into PayPal. They saw a potential security issue, so we had to call them, which we did. Since that call, our fire-account is connected to our PayPal-account. All that in less than 2 working days. Amazing!

We are very happy of course 🙂 For now, we can finalise Ananda and start promoting it. Yeah!