(Online) Business Banking Nightmare

<p>After starting the process of opening a business bank account at my local branch and finding the staff I was dealing with to be famously unhelpful and alarmingly ***********, I decided to switch to the online option. I was contacted by a gentleman on Friday morning (16 September 2016) who assured me that proceeding with the "online" option would be a quick and painless process. </p> <p>The process has been far from quick and painless.</p> <p>I received an email requesting documents on Friday, shortly after the initial phonecall, to which I promptly rep**** - to the different email addresses the email asked for a response to be sent to, since FNB appears to be unable to make up its mind regarding which department needs to process these documents.</p> <p>On Saturday afternoon I received a phonecall from a woman with whom I may have had the least intellectual conversation of my entire existence thus far. It is ********** to think that this woman, who seemed to embody incompetence, is working in business banking and handling this process and processes like this. Needless to say, I should have realised then that I should lower the sandard of service I had been expecting. Anyway; this call was followed by another email requesting that a new set of documents be completed and sent to yet another email address.</p> <p>Yesterday, I called for some help in completeing one of the forms and spoke to another woman who was quite helpful (there was bound to be one person in the office who knew more or less how to do their job), so kudos on that. I sent the new set of requested documents to the latest email address provided shortly after.</p> <p>Today, when I phoned to enquire about the progress of my application, I spoke to a third woman who, while helpful, informed me that there was an issue with the signatures on one of the forms (which had been signed in the logical way considering the medium of transfer, i.e. electronically).</p> <p>In summary - this process of opening a business account "online" has been anything but quick and painless and I am highly unimpressed with how long this process is taking and with the overall level of service and assistnce. At this point, I regret fully the decision to move my application "online" and I would recommend that FNB's business banking consultants be more truthful from the outset about how long their "quick and painless" online application process is going to be.</p>