Your assertion is incorrect; you may wish to check this out: https://www.clc-uk.org/consumers/find-a-licensed-conveyancer/
5 Likes
Sorry, you lost me there completely, no idea what youâre on about there.
Not that I need to clarify, but the conveyancer I used for our recent house sale/purchase, is a fully qualified solicitor who just happens to specialise in new build purchases. As I say, often, you get what you pay for and just like in any profession, there are the very good, the good, the mediocre and the downright poor.
2 Likes
You may well, however despite your obvious needs and undoubtedly many like you, Barclays have crunched the numbers, this time at branches in Northamptonshire. Read the story and look at the customer numbers and note that fewer than 10% of transactions now take place in branch:
Barclays: Daventry and Towcester branches to close - BBC News
1 Like
I did and a standalone âConveyancerâ would not be legally competent.
I would require a Solicitor regulated by the Law Society to transact.
I have to admit, Iâm somewhat confused by your belief that Licenced Conveyancers who are not actual solicitors, arenât legally competent. What is your source for this belief? Iâm not attempting to be argumentative here, Iâm genuinely interested.
3 Likes
At the risk of going wildly off topic, in England and Wales conveyancing is normally done by a solicitor or a licensed conveyor (unless you do it all yourself⌠If youâre getting a mortgage your lender will insist on a solicitor anyway). Both may well employ unqualified conveyors to do a lot of the dirty work, but who canât do the legal transactions - conveyancing is about the transfer of title, which is where a decent lawyer is essential imo. As @Topsy2 describes, itâs worth finding a decent conveyancer, as they will almost certainly think of things others wonât. A decent mortgage broker can also be worth their weight in goldâŚ
1 Like
Thanks but your assertion is incorrect.
The underlying legislation quoted on the CLC website isnât relevant and website guidance details only a Solicitor or acting directly (in rare cases with no mortgage) only.
Iâm assuming you are aware of the differences in law between Scotland and England & Wales? The procedures for the sale and purchase of homes between them, can be quite different. My sale/purchase, was in England. I still used a fully qualified conveyancing solicitor because of the complexity involved. I definitely made the right choice.
2 Likes
Thatâs fair - Iâm willing to agree to disagree.
While I take the point that most branch-staff are likely to have more detailed knowledge of their corporate platform and systems, and therefore may be more likely to be able help you than you are able to fix the problem yourself, my point really was that the branch doesnât really have direct access to back-office systems in the same way they would have done in the 1970s (when each branch handled their own accounts). If the whole system has gone down, the branch front-end into it will also have failed. In that scenario, internal phone lines also arenât likely to be much help. Furthermore, usually these days the staff you can speak to via telephone banking also have access to the same internal phone lines (they can put you on hold while they consult with them) and back-office forms which they can fill in on your behalf to be processed by the relevant team.
All of this is why, after the TSB migration disaster, staff in branches were having to make notes of transactions with pen and paper for certain customers (those whoâs profile had been corrupted). The details of the transactions then had to be manually input later once everything was back up and running. Obviously going into the branch did allow those customers to access emergency cash, but it didnât mean their account was fully-functional at the branch level.
To me, this made the argument for holding a second unrelated bank account with moderate emergency funds more than an argument for branch-banking.
Again, as I was alluding to earlier, it is usually possible to make a CHAPS transfer over the phone so you donât have to attend the branch. I accept that you may have found it expedient and it clearly worked well, but in a hypothetical scenario where you didnât have a branch to go to it would still have been possible to make the transfer.
@Topsy2 has also made the point that it is often possible to pay via solicitors in such a way as to not need to do all the dealings with the bank yourself - so no need to attend the branch, as the solicitorâs end covers all the necessary anti-money laundering stuff for you.
Thanks for all the explanations on conveyancing and solicitors. You could always have sent payments for faster payments on a deposit over a few days. Also the mortgage is normally sent by the bank to the solicitor and then forwarded on for a chain or to redeem a mortgage.
Thatâs true, historically, but with regulators clamping down on this sort of activity the âbenefitâ to the bank of having you there has now virtually vanished.
Back when I first opened my Barclays account, they required a branch visit ostensibly to verify ID (which they mainly did via Credit Reference Agencies anyway) but it was clear it was also serving the purpose of âintroducingâ me to a Barclays Personal Banker in an attempt to build loyalty and affinity for them. There was no hard sell and the guy was actually very nice; I do remember a slightly archaic moment when the form-filling was competed and he shook my hand saying âwelcome to Barclaysâ though! Since Megan Caywood has joined Barclays, that hoop has been removed to make it easier for new customers to join the bank. In fact, as the Built by Mars case study showed, the whole onboarding process has been overhauled to be digital-first (and the same is true, to a lesser extent, at all banks).
What I was really getting at in my earlier post, when I said that lots of people still âdefaultâ to a branch for big moments because itâs âwhat theyâve always doneâ, was that the demographic of branch-reliant customers is almost exclusively the middle aged and upwards. I fully expect branches to eventually die out as that demographic dies off too; part of the reason they default to branch interaction is because they still remember when that was the only option so they think of it as the âmost importantâ channel because they are used to using it. Younger people simply donât have the same attachment, and are usually too busy to go to a branch anyway due to most of them only being open during working hours.
Going to branches because of a failure in process will also be a thing of the past soon. Banks will have to develop remote ways of handling these things to allow them to justify further branch closures, so it is is massively in their interest to do so. The only thing that has held them back so far is the complexity of their own IT systems, but they will eventually get over this. COVID has also already introduced necessary reforms in this area and, crucially, shifted customer expectations towards expecting a remote option. People no longer accept a request to âjust pop in to the branchâ so readily as a result.
1 Like
I tend to agree with that. There seems to be huge conflict of interest too with Which, LINK and the Access to Cash Review being connected in one way or another.
If you actually read some of their case studies, many of them read just as well as an argument against cash for itâs hassle-factor and inflexibly with denominations as they do for cash. For example, Stella says âyou canât pay a friend back with a card when theyâve done some shopping for youâ; you can with cheque (totally non-digital for the payer and possible to pay in via app) or online/telephone bank transfer. Or use something like Starlingâs connected card. Joe says local people need cash because of cash-only businesses (a bit of a self-defeating argument in my opinion) and Gem says she is a very digital person but needs cash to pay for cabs (again, reading between the lines, more of case of cash being the only thing accepted rather than her payment preference). If these people were the most cash-reliant Which could find it says something about the campaign, I think.
Itâs the same kind of circular argument as this(what tourists want to spend their holiday in a bank branch?), where they want a âshared local branchâ because âthe Post Office isnât good enoughâ - well thatâs exactly what the Post Office is. And if they âcanât justify it here, where on earth can theyâ - exactly, banks canât justify it because it wouldnât get enough use.
There is also a recurring argument that goes along the lines of âyou know where you are with a bit of cash; once itâs gone, itâs goneâ. Thatâs the same with every transaction, regardless of payment method. Cash, in many practical ways, is actually less logical. Small bits of polymer are worth more than heavier metal coins. 2p is a fairly big coin but is virtually worthless. A red piece of plastic is âworthâ ÂŁ50, but a green one only ÂŁ5. This is all just âbecause we say it isâ, and there is collective confidence in the currency. There is nothing particularly logical about it, people only think itâs logical because they have got used to it. A lot of cash users claim to be able to easily tell exactly how much money they have available to spend, but anybody who has ever looked in a stuffed wallet knows that it is very difficult to estimate the value of a wad of cash or pile of coins. An app or even a bank statement gives you a clear value, and for people without smartphones they could always check their balance at a cash machine (if they can still find one, as cash declines)!
If they actually gave not using cash a go, they would probably get used to it just as easily, and in many ways contactless and mobile payment especially are more hygienic, more secure and quicker.
Good point, that would be more useful to most people probably - but Iâm sure banks would argue that branches have never been open 24/7 so there is âno needâ for phone lines to be!
Yes but thereâs a clear rebuttal here, without the ability to call 24/7 the throughput of the phone lines as they are mixed with the people who went to the branch, should overrun them
1 Like
Yes and no!
They can easily solve that by re-deploying staff from closed branches to home-working call handling, during peak times in the day.
The sort of (generally elderly) people using branches would only want to call in the day anyway. They arenât going to be the type to want to speak to their bank at 3am!
You canât credit Megan for that. I opened a Barclays account online, no ID required, before Megan joined Barclays.
Fair enough, but I donât think it was possible to open an account entirely via their app before she joined?
It is now!
You may be right, I opened mine online, not through the app, but it didnât ask me for any ID.
As a result of the closures, HSBC will have 441 branches, with 96 of them âfull serviceâ.
Another 172 are âcash serviceâ offering access to cash and simple over the counter services and 173 are âdigital serviceâ with no counters and self-service points.
1 Like
I think the measure of any financial institution is what happens when things go wrong. And one of the reasons that I have never gone âfull Monzoâ/âfull Revolutâ/âfull Starlingâ is because they have this annoying habit of locking your money up for months, whilst the 2 people they employ in AML slowly work their way through the Augean stable of locked accounts, with absolutely zero incentive for them to deal with it in a timely way - I mean, hey, itâs not as if you can take your money elsewhere, is it ?
And we bank therefore with bigger banks because, although the scenario above is still possible, they will (probably) have a bigger back office, and you can indeed pop by a branch to show them your passport/driving licence/Council tax bill for ID purposes, and not have it constantly rejected âbecause itâs a bit blurryâ. But I guess bigger banks will begin to slide into neobank practices as branches close and their (non-income generating) back office is slashed. Santander - who I bank with - have just
a) cut the hours of the call centre
b) changed the number to a fee earning one
Whilst merrily cutting branches and staff. I must call them once every couple of years, but on every occasion I have, it would have been impossible to âdo this onlineâ and the average wait time to speak to someone was 30-40 minutes - and could not have sorted this issue out in the bank (it was them blocking Google Pay for some unfathomble reason - âas fraud preventionâ)