Horrible customer experiences in Germany: Postbank

Over the years, I have encountered a disturbing number of truly depressing behaviors from various German companies, both privately and in my professional and business life, be it stemming from incompetence, from blatant disregard for the customer’s rights, or from an inability to understand that both parties have to keep up their end of the bargain. I intend to discuss some of them over time, starting with the events around the business account I until very recently held with the Postbank (a banking subsidiary of Deutsche Post, the German “Post Office”). I recommend all readers to without exception have no dealings whatsoever with this grossly incompetent and customer hostile institution.

In an incomplete account:

1. The account was supposed to come with a credit card, barring a vague disclaimer about credit worthiness. This disclaimer is fairly standard in Germany and something someone in good standing should be able to ignore—and I* earned well, had a bit of money put aside, and had never failed to pay a correct and undisputed bill. Still, I was refused a credit card, with the claim that these were not available to businesses* younger than, in my recollection, two years—something not mentioned with one word in advance.

   *Note that I work in a legal form that does not require the explicit founding of a company, implying that my credit worthiness as a business entity is (or at least should be) the same as my credit worthiness as a private person. This also makes the time limit applied harder to defend.

   No alternatives were presented (e.g. a debit or pre-paid card or a deposit).

   My request, about a year later, to look at the amount* of money in the account instead of the age of my business went without a reaction.

   *I will not discuss details of that kind here, for reasons of privacy. However, it was considerably more than I could realistically spend with the types of limits that apply to most German credit cards—and it had a history of rapid growth over the year that had passed.

   As a result, I was forced to use my private* credit card for e.g. booking and paying hotels, resulting in an unfortunate mixing of private and business funds/transactions, probably formally violating the terms of use for my private account, and removing many of the benefits with having a business account. Certainly, had I been told in advance about the business-age limit, I would absolutely not have opened my business account with the Postbank.

   *This credit card, as well as my private bank account, are with another bank.

2. The account was supposed to come with a fully functioning Internet banking (and is anything else even conceivable in the years 2015 and 2016?!?). This did not turn out to be the case: In order to take actions within the online banking, including executing money transfers, I needed mTans*. In a first step, this required entry of a cell-phone number, to which a text message would be sent as verification, after which everything would work. However, despite several attempts on several days and despite a fully functioning cell phone**, I never received this text message.

   *I.e. Tans sent to a mobile phone. Frankly, the technical problems aside, it is very weak of a bank to force some specific technology on the users in that manner. What if someone does not have a cell phone?

   **Including the ability to receive text messages, something I verified carefully through copy-and-pasting the phone number from the online-banking page to an SMS-sending tool.

   My requests that the Postbank fix the problem went unheeded. Alternative means to activate mTans or do online banking were not provided.

   With this, the remaining benefits of a business account were gone and, again, I would certainly never have opened the account, had I expected such problems.

3. As time went by, money accumulated on my business account from bills paid by my customers while my private account grew thinner and thinner, seeing that I had to pay all my costs, private and business, from my private account.

   I now wanted to transfer money to my private account and used one of the provided (paper) forms for an inconvenient and fee requiring* transfer. This transfer was never executed and I never received any notification as to the the “that” and “why”.

   *Whereas transfers through online banking, had they been possible, were free of charge.

4. A little later, I finally bought a suitable apartment (cf. earlier posts) and needed to pay the seller. This time I went directly to the bank/post office, bringing a number of documents, including identification papers, with me, so that this could be done directly in the office, with no possibility of a hick-up. At the same time I wanted to transfer the lion’s part of the remainder to my private account.

   What happens? The clerk hands me several forms and asks me to complete them—apparently unable to do anything of what I had expected. Well, if filling in forms was the only thing available, I could have saved myself the walk and the almost half-hour (!) long wait in the queue, and just done this at home with the forms I already had.

   I filled in the forms, double-checked them, had the clerk double-check them (comparing against the known amounts and papers with printed versions of the relevant account numbers). This while explicitly mentioning the earlier unexecuted transfer and having emphasized how important it was that nothing went wrong. The clerk had no objections whatsoever to the form contents and claimed that the money would be transferred in no more than three* days.

   *Considerably slower than with online banking. (But in all fairness, I likely would not have been able to transfer so large a sum in one sitting per online banking anyway. The transfers to my private account are different, because I could easily just have made a monthly transfer for a smaller amount.)

   I waited four (!) days and still found no trace of a transfer.

5. Come the next banking day, I went to another office, further away from my living quarters, where I expected a more bank- and less post-centric support from the external presentation, in order to terminate my account, ensure that the apartment seller received his money, and that every last cent of the remainder were transferred to my private account.

   Despite the exterior giving a “banky” impression, including having signs advertising various bank services, this office turned out to know nothing about banking, being virtually dedicated to postal matters. Not only that, the clerk I talked to this time was extremely rude and aggressive, from the first word on, apparently considering me an idiot for coming to them for a bank matter—never mind their own signs… In the end I was sent to a central office several kilometers away, where I eventual managed to find someone who was a dedicated bank employee.

6. This visit took half-an eternity, with time spent waiting for service, with explanations, research of what had happened to the earlier transfers, the filling out and signing of form after form, …

   As it turns out, the first transfer had been rejected due to deviations in the signature. That might have been acceptable (I certainly do not want others transferring my money) had I been informed—but I was not. (As an aside, pen-and-paper signatures are an idiocy, being far to easy to forge, and suffering from considerable variations when written by the same person on different occasions. However, that is not a problem with the Postbank but with the overall system.)

   The other two had been filtered out because the scanner had been uncertain about the amounts. This sound more like an excuse than a reason, but is not entirely implausible, with standard German and Swedish digits being somewhat different. However, what followed later is under no circumstances acceptable: Firstly, such ambiguity should have been easily handled by a human reader (remember that the original clerk had verified the correctness and, by implication, readability)—and they had explicitly mentioned the amounts involved during the phone call, without prompting, which proves that they had no problems reading the numbers. Secondly, again they had failed to notify me.

   For the money transfer to the apartment seller, the situation was now urgent, and the clerk recommended an “express transfer”—for which I would have to pay another 15 Euro. This despite the only reason the express transfer was needed was the incompetence of the Postbank… Having no other choice, not wanting to risk the seller backing out, I consented, but clearly stated that I would demand these 15 Euros back. As promised, the money was transferred the same day.

   However, the money transfer for the remainder was not executed at all. This despite there being no room for error, the forms having been filled out by the clerk this time, and again without my receiving any type of notification as to the “that” and the “why”.

   Instead, the amount from the second of my earlier transfers to the private account suddenly turned up a few days after this visit. In combination, this is an obvious, obviously deliberate, and gross violation of my expressed will.

   To boot, despite my account being unambiguously terminated, with the additional unambiguous demand that any remainders of my money be transferred to my private account, this remainder has still not been transferred—almost two weeks after the visit. (And despite the clerk’s claim that money from an account termination should be available within roughly one week, even when not otherwise transferred.)

   As a result, the Postbank is currently sitting on a significant amount of money that they have no right whatsoever to sit on, while I find myself short the same amount of money.

   I have no idea whether they intend to return it, let alone when—but I do know that I will file criminal charges, contact the German Bank Inspection (Bafin) with a detailed complaint, and instruct a lawyer to take steps to retrieve my money against any and all further obstructions by the Postbank.

As an excursion, I originally picked the Postbank for my business account due to the, so it was presented, large net of bank offices, virtually every post office also being a bank office. In reality, as I have come to understand over the last few weeks, most of the post offices are useless when it comes to banking matters—even when their signs claim otherwise. In reality, the number of offices to take seriously is quite limited and the service network is far weaker, not stronger, than that of the main competitors (e.g. Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, and, locally, various Sparkassen). Mostly, everything that can be done is to fill out a form that is then mailed to a more central office.

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