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I second not dealing with HSBC. They've been fined as mentioned in the article. They've also lost enormous amounts of data through mismanagement and to hackers,

I second not dealing with HSBC. They've been fined as mentioned in the article. They've also lost enormous amounts of data through mismanagement and to hackers, so have gone to the other extreme of "safeguarding" their data. I put safeguarding in quotes because a couple years ago I was responsible for the technical aspects of the acquisition of a small fin. book from HSBC. They did a lot of absolute dictation of governance hurdles which they "enforced" - again the quotes, because they came to our offices and nodded wisely when I rattled through our list of safeguards. But very clearly didn't understand a thing about the controls we said we were using. They also didn't ask for any evidence of the controls. That really surprised me, after all the noise they'd made leading up to that meeting. I don't rate them technically at all, so have to wonder what their business capability is like...

katet 9y ago
Not to pick on you particularly (this is just where I got to in the comments) but who _would_ you recommend instead for others trying to avoid this? Particularly for the UK, since a lot of the time the HN crowd is US-centric :)
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Not to pick on you particularly (this is just where I got to in the comments) but who _would_ you recommend instead for others trying to avoid this? This is the problem. There are nightmare stories about basically every major bank and financial service, and while there are two sides to every story, a lot of them certainly look like well justified complaints about wildly inappropriate treatment. If someone was doing much better, we'd all be using them already. For now, I can only agree with the general advice many are giving: diversify, so you never have personal and business with the same organisation, never have all your essential accounts and cards with the same organisation, and so on.

katet 9y ago

Not to pick on you particularly (this is just where I got to in the comments) but who _would_ you recommend instead for others trying to avoid this? Particularly for the UK, since a lot of the time the HN crowd is US-centric :)

Silhouette 9y ago
Not to pick on you particularly (this is just where I got to in the comments) but who _would_ you recommend instead for others trying to avoid this? This is the problem. There are nightmare stories about basically every major bank and financial service, and while there are two sides to every story, a lot of them certainly look like well justified complaints about wildly inappropriate treatment. If someone was doing much better, we'd all be using them already. For now, I can only agree with the general advice many are giving: diversify, so you never have personal and business with the same organisation, never have all your essential accounts and cards with the same organisation, and so on.