After Public Outcry From Customers, Britain's Biggest Bank HSBC Heads Off Complaints Over Small Business Account Closures (theguardian.com)

Julia Kollewe writing for The Guardian: HSBC has rushed to head off complaints from small businesses that found the bank had frozen or closed down their accounts as part of a crackdown on financial crime. Hundreds of small firms are thought to be affected, whose businesses range from an avocado importer to marketing and design companies. Britain's biggest bank, which has faced accusations of reacting slowly to the debacle, said that after becoming aware of problems in the past week, it was putting extra staff on its helpline and speeding up the process for dealing with complaints. It said staff were reducing the amount of time to unfreeze an account once a review had been completed. Earlier on Monday, Richard Davey, an HTML5 game developer and creator of Phaser, shared his ordeal dealing with HSBC, which had suspended transactions from his accounts without much explanation. It was only after thousands of users brought it to the company's attention on social media that the company fixed Davey's account, he said.

Comments

Re:US, too

[JBMcB]

I don't run a small business, but the sheer incompetence of large banks like these are why I do my banking with a credit union. Any time I've had an issue, I've been able to resolve it in under five minutes. If you get to know some of the people who work there, they'd probably nip idiotic moves like this in bud.

It's not the banks doing it, it's the federal regulatory agencies. Small banks have to report this behavior, too. It's the regulatory agencies that are ordering the banks to freeze accounts.

Also, it's apparently $10,000 per transaction, not $5000.