Please recommend a bank and current account - needed urgently

Unfortunately any new bank will look at your recent history and you're unlikely to get what you need. New customers don't necessarily get an 'excess limit', which is basically how much you can go beyond your overdraft. Even getting an overdraft could be difficult. Has your account always been within limits until now?

Sorry to be a bit defeatist but lending criteria is so much tighter.

Up until moving our account to Abbey our credit rating was excellent. Since moving it, we've had so many problems I don't know what it is at the moment.

I work in financial services so I know how tough it is at the moment and this really isn't helping. I'm lucky that my employer doesn't see the need to credit check his admin staff, as the FSA suggest, as in many financial organisations, this type of thing could lead to me losing my job.

Hi,

We've recently moved to Alliance & Leicester & the whole move was dead easy. They also pay 8.5% on credit balances! We were with First Direct & they were rubbish.

HTH

What sort of problems? Your fault or theirs?

I think your best bet is to ride it out for 6 months and keep your bank accounts within agreed limits, then move.

Why is this "urgent"? you cant just open an account in 5 minutes anyway.

My H's business accounts are also with Abbey and he's had problems with those, which then have a knock-on effect with the personal account. For example, he has to pay all his cheques and cash in via the ATMs. OFten these aren't working. They won't allow him to use counter service, so the cheques can't be paid in so don't clear quickly enough to transfer the money across to the personal account. The branches, personal and business centres refuse to talk to one another and refuse to take into account that the reason there's not enough money is because their machinery isn't working.

I want to get the account moved asap as I refuse to pay Abbey any more money than I have to. I know it's not a five minute job but we can get it done in a couple of weeks.

i assume he gets free banking? the trade off with the free banking is that you dont get counter service.

I am thinking of moving my business bank account to Abbey (I bank with them presonally). I am currently with the RBS who have just put charges up yet again and for the number of times a month I use the counter service to pay in, I would be happy to pay in via the cash machine.

I have used most banks over time - I have business accounts with RBS and Barclays, personal with Abbey, H banks with LLoyds TSB, have Halifax and Tesco accounts for son and I have a NatWest credit card. I find all of them pretty much the same really - good and bad points with all. Sorry - I have not really helped!

We are now both with First Direct for our current accounts and have had no problems. I moved from Barclays and H from Nationwide. Barclays were particularly naff but H didn't have any major problems with Nationwide either.

we use First Direct for all but our Mortgage which is with Barclays. First Direct are brilliant, we've never had an issue with them.

We switched a few weeks ago from Halifax to Natwest. We've had a couple of hundred pounds worth of charges over the past few years (though none in recent months) we started the process to claim them back and I retaliation Halifax closed our account and demanded our quite significant overdraft back immediately.

I went to Natwest and explained everything and the new account was open in 4 days and it took around 10 days for our debit cards and PIN's to arrive. They even agreed to an overdraft limit which was the same as the Halifax account so we could pay them back though it is only for a limited period.

So far everything has been great with them so they maybe worth a try.