How Week Four of the Bounce Back Loan Scheme Went

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The cracks in the Bounce Back Loan scheme had certainly began to appear by week four, and whilst some 91,285 BBLs has been approved that week, many people who had applied back on or around the 4th of May with the lies of HSBC, Barclays, and Santander to name but three lenders still had received no update on their loan application.

During week four, that being on the 29th of May, the British Business Bank finally announced that Metro Bank was approved to lend out Bounce Back Loans.

Metro Bank did keep their customers waiting as they stated they wanted their “state of the art” BBL online application to be 100% fool proof before they launched it, or words to that effect.

Below are some of the never-ending stream of messages I received during week four, and as you will see I did get good and bad feedback about many peoples experiences so far of the Bounce Back Loan scheme.

It was also during week four, I launched the Mr Bounce Back website, with the aim of listing some of the many complaints I had received about the BBL scheme and passing on hints and tips to those experiencing such problems as to how they can get them addressed.

There was a good level of success with those waiting when they contacted the CEO of any bank they were experiencing problems with, however often complaints were met with a wall of silence when contacting a bank, much the same as happens now, and customer support staff at most banks were ill-equipped to answer any Bounce Back Loan related questions.

I instructed all my followers this week to start badgering the Santander CEO via email if they were still being messed about by that bank, and that appeared to work as many people did finally get paid out after emailing.

One rather worrying trend that had started to appear with some lenders is that they were issuing Bounce Back Loans, and then snatching them back, with the excuse that they did not have the “appetite” for the market place some businesses operated in.

Some banks also started to add their own criteria for issuing Bounce Back Loans on top of the standard criteria that the scheme had been built around.

NatWest also paid out Bounce Back Loans and then closed the accounts of some of those they had issued those loans too, this was a trend that has continued throughout the scheme, and I often still get daily complaints about them doing such.

People were asking Tide what their position was on their “waiting list”, it was beginning to dawn on people that Tide were having some type of problem and were not processing the amount of BBLs they had expected them to do, with only £50million to lend amounting to around 1666 BBLs and based on the huge number of people on their waiting list lots of people were about to be disappointed.

For reference people were still getting errors on the Barclays online banking BBL application form and could not apply due to those errors and many people were still waiting for new EchoSign’s to be issued by HSBC due to the “000” bank account number error of the previous week.

I also started to see some people that were declined a Bounce Back Loan from some lenders then manage to get a BBL with another lender.

One question that I was always being asked as soon as a BBL was paid, was whether people should transfer the money out to another account. Many people having seen the way many banks were snatching back BBLs and closing accounts (often erroneously) were fearful after waiting for weeks to get a BBL they might have that happen to them.

Banks later on as the scheme progressed did get upset with people who did transfer their money out, however that was a situation THEY put people in by snatching back BBL’s and closing accounts erroneously, never forget that.

If you have not yet done so watch that video above and you will see some of the many problems people did experience in week four.