Bank of Scotland rejects ‘non-UK’ ID . . . from Ulster
T.T. writes: Before lockdown, we visited the Isle of Arran branch of t he Bank of Scotland, as we required £10,000 in cash the next day to pay for renovations to our holiday cottage. We had been told that ID in the form of a UK or EU driving licence was sufficient, but at the bank the next day we were turned away and told that the Northern Ireland licence we produced was unacceptable.
BECAUSE you travelled from one part of the UK to another, you and your wife were not carrying passports, which would have proved your identity.
And the situation was made worse because bad weather meant you had to leave the island the next day. Returning to pay your builders the cash they wanted meant facing another £500 or so in travel costs.
But the real puzzle was why a Scottish bank would reject a driving licence that is issued in Northern Ireland, another of the nations that makes up the United Kingdom. That licence can be used as proof of identity when you vote, or get on a plane, or when you hire a car. It is accepted by the police, so why not by the Bank of Scotland?
The answer is that the bank does not tell its customers in its terms and conditions exactly what it will – or will not – accept as proof of identity for large withdrawals. Apparently this is for the bank’s own security reasons.
However, when you went to the trouble of enquiring before you needed the money, you should have been told that your Northern Ireland licence was useless.
Or was it? The Bank of Scotland tied itself in knots, telling me that it does accept Northern Ireland licences, but then saying at the same time that it refused to accept one from you or your wife because the branch was unable to carry out an unexplained security check.
I can tell you that this security check is in fact an independent system which the bank uses to validate all UK driving licences – with the s l i ght s nag t hat t hi s s yst e m excludes Northern Ireland.
Despite this, Bank of Scotland branches are allowed to compromise, by checking the signature on a licence against a customer’s sample signature which it has on file.
And this led to a startling admission by the bank. It was your wife that asked for the £10,000, and the bank did not have her signature. She has been a customer for almost 40 years, and has regularly signed cheques and made withdrawals. But now the bank says it failed to keep any sample of her signature.
Bank of Scotland says it transferred sample signatures to computer, but failed to transfer Mrs T’s signature even though it kept on cashing her cheques.
Helpfully, staff told me that any customer can go to a branch and fill in a simple form to supply a signature. But of course, they have to know in the first place if the bank has failed to store their signature, so perhaps this is not so helpful after all.
The bank says it will only prompt
The Arran error cost a couple £425 customers like you after a problem has arisen, and not before.
You asked the Financial Ombudsman Service to look into what happened and it did. In a nutshell, the Ombudsman decided that whatever rules and terms the bank applied were its own business, even if they were not revealed to customers.
The bank gave you £75 to reflect the wrong advice it gave the day before your attempted withdrawal in Arran.
This reduces your loss to about £425, and that is a costly lesson in the failings of your bank, but which I have to say the Bank of Scotland shows no sign of having learnt, leaving other customers at risk of finding out the hard way.