Delete the name RBS from that post and insert any other bank - they are all the same. In any case it was the local branch being stupid not the whole bank. I have had exactly the same stupid attitude from Halifax, Santander, Nationwide and NatWest. Even the ethical Co-op tried to rip us off.
I find that amazing!
If I had walked into our local branch and trousered one of those Perspex display stands that they use for leaflets, worth about £20, the girl behind the counter would have (rightly) had me for stealing. If I walk into a shop and try to leg it with a £20 bottle of wine stuffed into my pants, I would be done for shoplifting.
OK, it's only £20, but that is not the issue. The issue is that a bank manager of a small rural branch thought it was perfectly correct to take £20 from our business account, when they had no legal right to do so and had explicitly and clearly agreed that no fee was payable. Not only did this man steal from our account, but he even went to the lengths of trying (unsuccessfully) to hide this theft, by mismatching the amounts between payee and payer.
No doubt, he thought "They'll never notice it!" and possibly justified it to himself, because we had large sums flying all over the place. "I mean, they're quibbling over twenty quid, when they are spending thousands and thousands on all sorts of fancy, high-tech equipment!"
It's the bald-faced dishonesty that seems to go right down to the level of a lowly branch manager that I find astonishing. It meant (for us) that we could not rely on our bank statements being a real and honest report of movements of money. From then on, our bookkeeping had to check each and every bank entry against our accounts - and quite honestly, they have better things to do!
It was the fundamental level of dishonesty that took my breath away!
So the bank tries to sell you insurance that you don't need. That's OK - I can tell them to F-off! If they try to lend me money, when I don't need any more money, I can politely say 'B'gger off!' Even when they pester me with calls about savings and investment schemes that no sane person would touch with a barge pole, I can tell them that I would rather be gang-raped by a troupe of orangutans.
Businesses can offer stuff that is good, bad or indifferent. I have no problem with that. If people are daft enough to get into debt that they cannot repay and the bank forecloses on the house or does something else nasty, well, that comes with the territory. If they offer you credit, but only if you buy one of their bogus insurance schemes, well, you perfectly free to tell them to stuff their credit where the sun don't shine.
But to just take money out of our account because they feel that it ought to be due to them, even though they agreed previously that it was not (and then try to hide it!) is in a completely different ball park!
