Written By Amy Park

A full rebranding of Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks began this year following a £1.7 billion merger with Virgin Money back in October 2018.

As a collective the organisations expect the full transfer to take place on the 21st of October 2019, shortly after the Sanctions Hearing at Parliament House in Edinburgh on the 26th of this month. Though legal notice was only issued on the 21st of June 2019, leaving customers questioning what will happen to their money.

Some employees for Clydesdale and Yorkshire Banking Group have mentioned that there may be losses that won’t be as substantially stated publicly as losing customers.

Roughly around 2.7 million customers from CYBG and 3.3 million from Virgin Money will be affected by the move, thus creating the sixth largest bank in the UK.

Some customer service advisors for the bank’s call centre expressed the recent stress of increased call queues initiated by recent updates and not having enough staff in to maintain the volume.

Many issues have been found on CYBG’s side recently due to many updates. Increased volume at the CYBG call centre has been exceeded when there appears to be no response on social media.

Customer Service Employee who would like to remain annonymous has said: “I don’t think it will result in a loss of customers as long as the bank are transparent with the changes that will come into place.

“I would really hope for there to be an increase in jobs because of the larger customer base, which I think will be over six million.

“After the disastrous attempt to update the mobile app and internet banking security, I’m not convinced that it will go through when they would like it to.”

Though some employees may think that customer’s won’t be leaving the bank anytime soon, there are a select few former employees who believe differently.

Financial Advisors have stated that there may be some worry for customers with either banks. This is concerning fixed term bonds that penalise you for withdrawing early. So, essentially you may need to take your finance checks into your own hands and confirm with either banks if the deposits and savings are qualified to be protected by the FSCS.

Ex-Employee, who would only like to be referred as Mary, commented on her experience working for CYBG, saying: “A lot of people had no respect for anyone who worked in the call centre, customer wise.

“It did lead to a few people crying, that I remember, and that was through training as well… When we did get on the floor, I think within the first three days possibly half the team quit because the customers we were getting were really rude, even threatening.

“Or sometimes the people that were like our pod managers would just wander off and we were just left to do it ourselves when we really didn’t know what to do.”

It has been stated that there may be a trigger for further job losses, on top of the 1,500 already set. This may increase after the transfer is completed in October.

Upskilled Employee, Ben Williams, for Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank has said: “I do believe the merger between the two companies will cause job loss, mainly in branches because of the re-design.

“How they want to show off how customer service works face-to-face and the fact that there will obviously be a lot of call centres closing down in certain areas and re-opening in other areas, but I think that will just trade over but there will be losses.

“The merger will take place on the 21st of October successfully, but there will be some issues that will affect customers because of the merging of systems.

“It will cause some problems with them, I’m unsure what they may be. It’s highly probably that there will be issues.”