Last week we told you about Rob who never got a $1400 wire transfer when he was a Netbank customer, and then after ING acquired the bank when it failed, their customer service never fixed the transfer despite 8-months of calls assurances. We gave Rob the phone number for ING executive customer service (302-255-3005) and now he happily reports:

Within a few hours of my initial contact, Laura got back to me via phone to let me know exactly what happened. It appears that the initial wire transfer paperwork was filled out incorrectly by the sender and the money hadn’t ever made it to Netbank or Ing Direct but only got to American Express Bank (who as acting as an intermediary in this transfer.) I contacted American Express Bank and in a few minutes they were able to confirm that the wire was incorrectly setup and the funds had been returned to the sending back on August 10th…

I do not know whether a the paperwork was filled out incorrectly as a result of incorrect wiring information I received from the Netbank CSR or a simple clerical error on the part of the sending bank, but in either case, the mystery is resolved. An 8 month delay was resolved in a matter of hours with the right phone number. Thank you very much for your help. I can confirm that ING Direct was very helpful and responded in a timely fashion when this information was brought to their attention in this way.

That’s awesome. Executive customer service for the win. Obviously lots of things can get lost when one bank acquires another, but there’s obviously some kind of internal bottleneck if Rob kept making requests for the matter to be investigated and all the reps could tell him is that they were once again submitting it to “Netbank research agents.” ING needs to review this department and see if agents are closing research trouble tickets without actually solving the problems.

(Pictured: ING CEO Arkadi Kuhlmann in fetching company fleece)

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