Travel insurer's failures led to debt collectors' letters After constant pressure from me most of the aforementioned bills were paid. A small expenses bill of around £100 was sent to you and the compensation offer made earlier was increased from £200 to £350. Axa Travel Insurance now admitted that there had been a failure to communicate effectively. Apologies were proffered and the insurer promised to tidy up outstanding matters. Actions, though, speak louder than words. When I managed to catch up with you, the £350 had not been paid, nor had you received the letter of apology that Axa Travel Insurance assured me it would send. A month later, when I had been told all was tied up, a $75 account remained unpaid. This had come about because the American medical services provider had billed you for the discount that Axa had arranged for itself on a $500 bill. The insurer had paid $425, so the provider had billed the difference to you. Axa was again slow to react to my attempts to resolve this. As your contract was with Amex I involved it too. It said it liaised with Axa and also said it has put measures in place to avoid this situation recurring. It has put enough Avios points on your card for return flights to Europe for two. In all, it took five months from the date you wrote to me for Axa to sort out the remaining cheques. It has increased its gesture of goodwill to £500. This, shockingly, was two months after I had had a written assurance that the discount bill had been passed on to Axa in the USA for urgent payment. Axa has said new processes were being put in place to help avoid breakdowns between its claims and complaints areas in future. The sad truth is I have heard this before from this insurer. Even so, Axa has excelled itself in poor communication and ineptitude both to you and to me over all of this. Amex has egg on its face too. If it turns out that you are on any debt list as a result of this, when I have absolutely been assured you are not, I will do an update in the column. As you say, it has never been about compensation but simply getting the matter sorted and having an explanation as to what was going on. This you do now have. It took eight months for a cleared cheque to reach my account We have lived in Australia for a number of years now and our issue stems from a £250 cheque which was a present from my father. This cleared his account many months ago. I have a photocopy of the cheque to confirm that. When I received the cheque from him I sent it to the branch of Santander we had used before we moved overseas along with a covering letter. I asked for it to be paid into my account but started to investigate when I realised our account balance had not changed. I discovered there was a dormancy flag on the account, which I managed to get removed sometime ago. I assumed at this point our missing £250 cheque would be credited to our account, but sadly not. I wrote to Santander Investigations in Bootle as advised, enclosing a photocopy of the cheque clearly indicating that it had been paid into a Santander account six months before. DG Queensland, Australia You had been told "Missing cheque deposits may be in a suspense (admin) account. The administrators of this account are usually able to apply the credit to the correct account within 48 hours of receiving a copy of the cheque. The following month, you called the Santander call centre five times and, despite several promises to phone you back, not once did the bank do so. The next month an investigation number was raised and again you were advised that a 48-hour time frame for a resolution would apply. None came and, eight months after the cheque had cleared your father's account and the funds had gone missing, you wrote to me. Further to this, Santander came back and confirmed as you already knew that due to the dormancy block on your Santander Current Account, the funds could not be paid in. Instead of telling you this, the bank said the funds "unfortunately" were then credited to an internal holding account. It glossed over the fact that weeks ago now the dormancy status had been reversed but the money was as elusive as ever. The £250 was now at last recovered and credited to you and £100 paid for your phone calls with something within that for goodwill. Clearly Santander needs to pull its socks up. A simple fund transfer request turned into an ordeal My cousin and I are so frustrated with the lack of service we have received regarding our joint savings account with Barclays Wealth International. We attempted to close our joint account four months ago. We have provided all of the requested information but the bank still refuses to close our account and transfer our funds to another bank as per our instructions. I thought you may be able to help us contact the correct person at Barclays to close this account. We would appreciate any assistance or advice you can give us regarding our situation. WO New York You originally opened an account with Woolwich, Guernsey, now part of Barclays. Although you have moved from place to place for job reasons, you say you have kept the New York address for the purposes of this account. The amount in the account was £19,633. You had been told by various people that there were problems about Barclays" unwillingness to accept notarised documents. You allege that officials at the Barclays Investment Bank in Tokyo had also stated to you that many customers have come to them for advice and assistance because Barclays Bank will not honour notarised documents. In your case, it had been suggested that you take the new certification template to one of various organisations including a British consular official. You had tried a British consulate and had not been surprised that the British official there declined to certify a US passport. You had then tried the Barclays plc office in Tokyo and obtained their certification. You had also written to the chairman of Barclays and following that received an email saying that you would have an update regarding this matter before close of business the next day. You did not hear anything further though, and three days after I contacted the bank a member of Barclays staff promised to transfer the money on that same day. There were then problems with the receipt at the beneficiary bank. These were of Barclays" making too as the full and correct reference had not been quoted. This meant the transfer was not effected until 11 days after you had been promised it would be as a result of my involvement. At last, your £19,633 has been transferred to where you wish it to be and £250 for compensation paid, with an additional 37p for lost interest. Some of the problems seem to have revolved around the fact that you have married and had a name change, although you have produced a marriage certificate. You had also taken US nationality. Despite this successful outcome, Barclays Wealth Investment Management tells me you denied it permission to disclose the details of the chain of events. A Barclays Wealth Investment Management spokesperson said, "While we cannot comment on this specific case, we are always disappointed when our service does not meet a client's expectations. We are pleased that we have been able to resolve this particular issue satisfactorily with our client. You said, "I firmly believe that only the fear of adverse publicity in your column and the inquiry you made moved Barclays sufficiently, so I am very grateful to you."