We are quite a fortunate company, we are a ‘cash company’ ie we have no borrowings nor do we operate within credit facilities supplied by our bank, overdrafts, loans, credit cards etc.

As an IT company which mainly offers service based offerings on annual contracts paid monthly by…

As a personal banking customer, I’ve been stung many times by Barclay’s fraud detection measures. Their score is something like this:

• Number of times my account(s) have been used fraudulently: 0
• Number of times Barclays have flagged my account: too numerous to mention

Now, if there had been some “unusual behaviour” on my account and Barclays had flagged it, I would be a much happier customer. Instead my account gets flagged regularly for things like paying my council tax online.

The best anecdote I have about their detection procedures is our first trip to Australia: we bought the tickets online the day before we flew (a story in itself) with my debit card, used the same card frequently to shop in and withdraw cash in various locations throughout Australia for the next 5 weeks, and then they flagged my account for trying to withdraw cash in Hong Kong Airport on the way back (with no way to unblock my account until I got home, and eight hours to kill in HK). They were really on the ball there…