HSBC leaves 1m businesses without bank managers

According to the Daily Mail as many as 1m businesses were left stranded without a bank manager at HSBC, leaving them with call centre staff who had chosen to freeze their accounts, meaning they were unable to pay suppliers or staff, in what was referred to as a "botched crackdown on crime" after the global lender was hit with a £1.2bn fine in 2012 for its role in laundering drug money for Mexican cartels.

Business owners had been quizzed by an overworked call centre that was forced to handle in excess of 1,800 appointments a year per employee, as HSBC closed 168 branches between 2014 and 2017 in an attempt to move more customers online, dumping 1,719 commercial staff across Europe along the way.

Mike Cherry, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: "When times are tough, there's no replacement for help from a known and trusted bank branch contact."

As a result of the 2012 fines HSBC, fearing it would lose its US banking licence, introduced a series of stringent checks on companies after American authorities instituted an independent monitor to examine its crime-stopping protocol.

Many of these checks were undertaken by its Nottingham-based call centre where staff had been given KPIs of seven half-hour conversations with mostly small businesses with no dedicated relationship manager.

An HSBC spokesman told the Mail, "We train re-mediation officers to help customers through the review process by phone and the information they gather is then checked thoroughly before the review is completed."

As of 1005 BST, HSBC shares were steady. Down just 0.89% to 727.60p.