READERS QUERIES:A couple of weeks back we featured a complaint about Ulster Bank's new Visa debit card. A reader contacted us after being unable to get cashback with his new card which Ulster Bank is hoping will replace its Laser cards.
We contacted the bank and were told that its customers could rest assured that the card worked in exactly the same way as a Laser card and getting cashback should not be a problem. We pressed the bank’s spokesman and asked if there were any significant problems. He said there was not.
Turns out that was not the full story.
After we carried the piece a significant number of people got in touch accusing the bank of misleading readers.
Eileen Goggin received her new Visa debit card in mid-November and has attempted “on numerous occasions” to get cashback with little success. Only once, in Marks Spencer, has the cashback facility worked.
She repeatedly complained to her branch and was told the complaint was being “sent up the line” but that this was an issue for the retailers and not for the bank.
She says: “It is not that I am shopping in unusual or small outlets. The refusals occur on a weekly basis in many of the main stores I frequent, including Woodies and Dunnes Stores.”
Dara O’Connor’s experience backs this up. “You cannot get cashback in most shops. I have contacted my branch and they have done nothing at all. They say it’s the first they heard of any problem but there were three people complaining in the branch at the same time so I find that hard to believe.”
And then there is William Power who had the same problem.
“Out of all our successful transactions we have never successfully got cashback. Any new machines get all the info direct from the card and it goes straight to putting your pin number in and has no cashback facility.
“If someone would like to come and be present when I use it to show me where I’m going wrong that would be great.”
We contacted the bank who insisted they had not misled us in the initial correspondence. A senior bank official did, however, accept that there had been significant problems – something we were not told when we first contacted the bank – but he laid the blame at the feet of third parties, including Visa and the service providers who manage the terminals, who, he said, had not communicated small changes that were required on the part of retailers to allow Ulster Bank’s Visa debit cardholders get cashback.
He said the bank would now write to all customers and apologise for all the problems that they had experienced and he added that senior bank staff would hold briefings with branches to alert them to the problems and to ensure that in-branch staff knew how to address them properly.
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