Ever since HSBC took over Mid-Med Bank it was pretty obvious to everyone that all they ever cared about was profits and nothing else. Customer care went by the wayside and the bank branches don’t look like bank branches anymore and the service has reached rock bottom. However, their latest intrusion in privacy takes the biscuit.

Back in the 1970s/80s, when the Labour government of the day took over the banks, hardly any money at all was allowed to be sent abroad. So, if, for instance, you went on holiday everything had to be prepaid from here and we were only allowed to take with us the equivalent of 116.5.

If you ever wanted to send a monetary gift to friends or family abroad, even as little as £10, you had to fill in numerous forms with all sorts of details – not just yours but even of the person you were sending the money to, including whether you had ever sent any other monetary gifts to this person before, when, how much and so on.

Thank God, those became things of the past but now it seems that HSBC, in its wisdom, has ordained that to send a monetary gift we have to go back to the good ‘old bad days’ and provide them with the full address of the beneficiaries.

If, perhaps, the bank wanted to know where to we were sending the cash for some commercial reason, I wouldn’t have objected at all but I do object to sending house number and street name as there could be no valid reason whatsoever for this kind of information.

I believe HSBC should take stock of what they’ve been doing during the years they’ve been here and start showing some consideration both to their staff but even more so to their many disgruntled customers.