Events of Week Eight of the Bounce Back Loan Scheme

BBL Helpline

The number of approved Bounce Back Loans continued to drop during week eight of the Bounce Back Loan scheme, in fact just 46,092 were approved from June the 22nd of June to the 28th 2020.

But as sure as night follows day, I was contacted by plenty of people who either managed to finally get paid outa BBL or were experiencing the seemingly never-ending stream of problems associated with that scheme.

The video below will give you some idea of the problems some people were facing, and you will see the relief some people experienced when they finally got their Bounce Back Loan sorted out:

During this week it became apparent that those who had been sent out an EchoSign from HSBC the previous week (16th of June) had not been paid after digitally signing it, and it turned out that once again that bank had made an error on those EchoSign’s.

This was the second time they had done this over the last few weeks; the first time it was a bank account error and this time it was a name error on that document. As such they once again had to send out another batch of EchoSign’s to everyone affected.

Another problem that I was seeing repeatedly was with the HSBC online portal, that was being used to allow people to set up a bank account or feeder account with that bank. Many people were being declined and some people had their applications stuck at one stage of that application.

That portal was, as I have mentioned previously, riddled with technical errors, it could time out and decline someone, people would load their documents up but unbeknown to them they never got loaded so a time out would eventually occur, and people would then be declined.

It was possible to get a timed-out application or a declined application re-activated but HSBC support was and still is so bad not many people could not contact the bank and find out why they had been declined or what was going on.

The only way to get a response was to contact the CEO team who would in turn designate a case handler to a customer who would then try and made sense of the problems they were experiencing and get those problems sorted out.

Some people who had experienced long and drawn-out problems with some banks also got offered compensation, the value of which did vary from bank to bank.

I had been recommending Clydesdale Bank to many people who could not get sense out of other banks, they were slow and methodical, however many people I did send their way did get sorted out with a Bounce Bank Loan.

Also, worthy of note was that many people who had been declined by Starling Bank did go on to get a BBL with other lenders.