This is a story of incompetence I had to share such poor customer service I am glad I am no longer a customer of Nat West Bank.

At the end of my experience I was told I could put in a complaint to be honest I didn’t see the point. I thought writing down what happened would probably be more effective for the organisation.

My experience with Nat West started over a year ago when I applied for a credit card offering an attractive balance transfer rate. When the card came the rate I was expecting didn’t materialise so I notified Nat West and ask for the card to be closed.

On the 16th April, 2024 I received a letter from Nat West saying the card was closed, I destroyed the card and thought that would be the end of it.

Then over a year later I received an email from Nat West saying their credit card terms and conditions were changing in August, 2025 which set off alarm bells for me. I wasn’t a customer or so I thought.

I didn’t have the letter from Nat West to hand at this point: (that had to be rooted out which took going through mountains of badly filed paper work) so I immediately tried to login on the Nat West banking app to see what exactly was going on.

I still had the digital app and correct password and four digit code but couldn’t login.

I then discovered “Cora” on what’s app set up to help people struggling to login to their Nat West online banking.

After waiting the first time, yep it gets worse for over 20 minutes to get a human being after being pushed through a load of automated prompts that didn’t apply to me I ended up with a phone number to call.

When I called the phone number I was again in a series of automated prompts and an AI voice “tell me simply what you are calling about”

I finally got through to a credit card section but without the 16 digit card number for a card destroyed 12 months prior I was going nowhere. I kept repeating “speak to a human” that wasn’t what the automated operator recognised.

I went back to Cora waited another 30 minutes for a human who just wasn’t listening and started arguing with me in complete denial about what I had just experienced.

I finally got another phone number out of the agent but not without a struggle. I left the chat suggesting they ring the first number provided and have the experience themselves.

I did get through to a human being on the phone. It took about 20 minutes on hold by which time I had found the letter from Nat West saying the account was closed April, 2024 with thankfully the 16 digit credit card number on it.

Although the person I was talking to, wait for it, couldn’t help because I needed to speak to the credit card people instead. She could not access anything to do with my issue. I thought I was down a snake again and back to square one but she did get me put through to someone else who was left in the embarrassing position of holding the baby with no explanation as to why the account was still open.

She was gracious and polite to be fair and did ask if I wanted to keep the account open, quite brave considering and then asked if I would like to go down the complaints procedure road which I declined, in favour of telling this story which I hope will improve a customer service department that is not servicing the customers in my experience.

The whole process took me about 4 hours in total.