It turns out that I pop out to the shops a flipping lot : to Morrisons, Sainsbury's Local, Costa, on a run, karate training twice a week and so on. Popping out every day sometimes four or five times daily. Usually all I'm carrying is my iPhone which I have on me at all times. Apple Pay was the solution to needing a coffee or a few bits of shopping unexpectedly and not having to grab my wallet every time just to have my debit card. Sure enough within days of the announcement that Apple Pay would launch in the UK both Marks and Spencer and Mint, my two credit card suppliers had agreed to join. From launch i was able to scan both cards and was up and running in minutes.
There's a problem though. Unfortunately I don't really use either of those credit cards very often and then only for larger purchases - I use my current account with Yorkshire Bank (part of the Clydesdale Banking group) for nearly all of spending needs. I also have my separate business bank account with Yorkshire. Again, unfortunately, YB have not announced any position I can find with regards to joining Apple Pay and are one of only two banks (the other being Barclays I understand) in the UK high street not to offer this facility to their customers.
This is really frustrating and I think this is backward looking and I'm sure they must be losing customers over this - I would have moved banks already except for the hassle of actually moving, plus I have two accounts not one with them and would have to move both to access the facility as I need to. So I'm waiting - for months I have been waiting patiently but no more. I began tweeting to the YB's two twitter accounts - one is @yorkshirebank - the general twitter account and another is their customer service account : @askyorkshire.
I began 'asking yorkshire' @askyorkshire six days ago - search for @localventure1 if you want to see my various tweets - all pretty low key and non threatening I think. So far not a single peep or inkling of a response from YB. Usually when you use a companies official twitter address and start moaning you usually get a response at least, although is you look at the feed for @askyorkshire you'll see that generally they only put positive stuff up there.
I did have a friend on twitter who told me that a friend of his who is employed by YB did post that this Apple Pay service was coming to YB customers in June 2016 but then strangely this post was taken down within minutes of going up. It looks as if not only is YB not answering me but that they are in some way censoring their own employees twitter accounts - really odd !
I think the problem is that the @askyorkshire moderators look at my @localventure1 details and see that I only have 300 followers and so aren't that bothered. Small fish and all that. They obviously don't realise that across other twitter accounts, all of which I retweet my messages from every time I'm actually reaching several thousands of followers.
Plus there's this blog - a business blog based in Leeds in the heart of Yorkshire with tens of thousands of uniques every year. A good popular post here can be read hundreds of times in a day and do you know which posts are the most popular - that's right, the controversial ones where I take people to task. Everyone loves to moan and hear about the bad stuff. An old boss of mine once said that if a company from whom you purchase a service does something right you'll tell at most two people but if they cock up you'll mention it at least ten times. Let's see how perhaps 10,000 tellings of this story to business people in Yorkshire affects things in the next few weeks - Maybe this will get Yorkshire Banks attention and they'll send me a response?
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