Why UK Banks Don't Tweet

An anonymous reader writes "Banks in Great Britain are running scared of using social media services like Facebook and Twitter — owing to case law that dates from 1924." That case law "means financial services companies can't publicly identify an individual who has an account with them," so responding to customer inquiries in other than the traditional ways (like post and in-person) could get banks in trouble.

Comments

Banks in the USA

[prakslash]

In case you are wondering what kind of 'twittering' banks engage in, here is a sample from some banks in the USA.

UK Banks do Tweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Lloyds TSB, Halifax and Bank of Scotland use Twitter as a means of customer service.

http://twitter.com/lloydstsbonline
http://twitter.com/Halifax_Online
http://twitter.com/bankofscot_help

Re:Wait,

[Cimexus]

I'm pretty sure you realise this, but that's not what any company uses Twitter for. They don't reveal personal/account details. But for quick, generic queries, Twitter is an excellent way to do customer service.

My mobile telephone company uses Twitter and I've used it for asking general questions about plans, prices, availability of new phones etc. They use it to announce new services, or outage notices (e.g. "Having some issues with our towers in location X, should be back to normal by 8am tomorrow!") and things like that. I've had some issues/questions resolved by going down this route in a matter of minutes, as opposed to sitting on their customer service phone line on hold for 30 minutes then finally getting some idiot who doesn't know the answer to your question anyway.

Plus, you can also use it for customer or account-specific queries as well, provided you already have a ticket number lodged. So lets say you called with a problem the other day and were given a ticket number. You might want to provide them with some updated info, or see what progress has been made with the issue. So you can tweet "hey any news on yet? Ticket #12345". A ticket number is useless to anyone but the company and no personal information gets revealed. My ISP does this and you usually get a reply on Twitter in a matter of minutes.

Can't see why this kind of thing can't work for banks either (although admittedly the scope of things going 'wrong' at a bank is less: maybe some ATM outages, or general enquiry* about interest rates and accounts etc.)

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* Why the hell is Chrome underlining enquiry as being misspelt? Argh, 'misspelt' too! FFS! You'd think for a global company which has properly localised versions of all their other products and websites, that Google could put an option for Commonwealth/International English into Chrome, rather than assuming everyone uses US English. Worse than bloody Microsoft!

You couldb't fit the disclaimer in a tweet

[petes_PoV]

Banks couldn't fit their required legal content (regulatory bodies, contact info, privacy statement and all the rest) in a tweet, let alone make any meaningful response. Likewise a customer with a complaint couldn't say much more than "you took my money".

Things like this need an audit trail. They need proper recording and most of all they need credibility. Tweeting (and FB, for that matter) don't offer any of these. They're fine for children to fantasise about who they luuuuuuuuuuuv that week (or hour) but for real-world applications they are worthless.

Even if banks did tweet I can't see any customers with an ounce of sense using the facility. Who'd put their account data in such an unsecured and unvalidated form?