Cancelled my Barclaycard Avios, but two years later it’s still active
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In Jul 2022 I requested to cancel my paid Barclaycard Avios card via the in-app chat. This was confirmed and I was given a unique reference and told it could take 24 – 48 hours to complete the cancellation.
Fast forward to today, and the account is still open, the monthly fees have been paid since 2022, and there have been various transactions on the card (mostly subscriptions, but also I forgot that I had wanted to close the account since I didn’t see value in it).
Shocking, but unsurprising given the overall experience with Barclay’s IT systems (almost making BA look good!).
Now, I still want to cancel and close the account. However, given the previous lack of account closure, is a complaint the correct route for this? If so, how should this be framed, and what should I expect?
Thanks!
It’s a bit of an odd story if you have presumably been paying £20/month and renewing subscriptions on the account and paying the bill each month. You say you had forgotten that you wanted to close the account but it’s all down to Barclays IT. Hmm!
Yes, from what you say, they made a single error at the outset which may have been the fault of the chat agent rather than any IT issue but you can’t quite pin all of this on them!
What are you wanting Barclays to do in all the circumstances?
There are two separate issues to deal with.
Firstly to close the account you need to call and speak to a person rather than a chat function.
The second issue is the putative complaint. Personally I wouldn’t complain because it’s your error that you didn’t sort this out last August when your bank account was first charged.
Not every thing is down to poor IT (and BAs IT isn’t as bad as people say it is) but user error.
True story – my former boss was as mad as a hatter and “didn’t do admin”.
He bought a big old pile in the 1990s and for the first year of ownership was absolutely impoverished. He was actually worried he might default and the bank would repossess his forever home.
Then he looked at his bank statement and discovered the bank hadn’t stopped taking payments for his old house which he had sold and cleared the mortgage on.
But because he was posh and his private banker was his second cousin thrice removed or something like that, they just had a giggle about it. He got a year’s worth of mortgage payments back and used it for a blowout housewarming albeit a year late.
And this man was responsible for running tens of billions of dollars of money and was incredibly good at it!
@Froggee I had the opposite scenario when I bought my first property (a 2 bed flat) in early 1991. For the first 6 months of ownership my mortgage payment was not debited from my bank account despite me contacting Nationwide Building Society each time the DD date went by and no payment taken.
Eventually I went into the local Nationwide Branch and showed them my bank statements asking them to show me where the direct debit was as I couldn’t see it. Nationwide insisted that they were taking money from my bank. On closer inspection it turned out that although they had the correct bank account number Nationwide had transposed the sort code so some other customer at a different branch of my bank was paying my mortgage. Until then I had no idea bank account numbers could be duplicated with sort codes being the only differentiator.
Nationwide politely asked if they could take six months payments in one go to catch up. I agreed on the basis that they did not reverse all the interest I’d been charged to that point and recalculate it (it was a straight repayment mortgage so any payment reduced the interest on the outstanding balance) Plus the mortgage interest rate went up to over 15% in that time period so I did not want them charging me at a higher rate than they should have.
@AJA 😀 Brilliant
In the APP, I am seeing Barclay card letters, messages from 2014 onwards; when I last held the card!
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