The HSBC UnionPay ATM debacle just won’t go away. Last Friday I wrote that the bank had kindly offered me a new Plus card because they are re-instating them after the UnionPay ATM cards have proved unusable in many countries. Plus and Cirrus, the old clearing systems, were accepted pretty much everywhere, but users reported problems withdrawing cash with UnionPay cards in countless countries outside Hong Kong and China.
That was Friday, today is Tuesday and I’m patiently waiting for an application for my new Plus card to drop on the mat. Nothing yet. In the meantime, lucky readers write to say they received their new Plus cards without having to apply.
Account complications
Then today I heard from an HSBC customer who was one of the first to find herself cashless overseas – in her case, Amsterdam. “As you know,” she writes. “I was one of the original sources of complaint to them as UnionPay does not work in Amsterdam, our second home. So I recently received an email from HSBC customer relations saying that she had posted a new ATM card to me, with Plus capability. I found this a brilliant example of follow-through except that there has been nothing in the post at all.”
So yesterday, she continues, she asked at the bank, then called this lady back at customer relations, and found indeed that she can get such a card – “BUT - of course there is a BUT - I must have an "integrated account". But she has, since 1981, had a simple current account. She was told that if she wanted an HSBC Plus card, she must change this, and change the account number, into any of three possible "integrated accounts". One, she was told, is the basic general integrated account, “which I must keep ticking over with HK$10,000 minimum at all times; then there's the smart/Vantage account which requires a minimum balance of HK$200,000, or the Premier account which requires a minimum balance of HK$1m.”
This customer is not impressed. “Naturally I won't be doing any of this, and will keep using the nice blue Standard Chartered Plus ATM card which I got some months ago and which works in Amsterdam just fine,” she concludes.