Jennifer took out a car loan from Regions bank way back in 2005, and paid it off in 2009. She never received the title, but that wasn’t an urgent matter until she was ready to get a new car, and sell or trade in her old one. Then she kind of needed the title. Thanks to the stunning incompetence of everyone at the branch where she originally took out the loan, this process somehow took six months.

I took a car loan out with Regions Bank in 2005, in 2009 the note was paid off. I never received a title. Cue life and my forgetting that I needed said title to prove ownership of the car. In January 2012 it was time for a new ride so I contacted the branch that the loan originated from. I spoke with a gentleman that said he would get the loan sent to me in a few weeks. I receive a copy of it in the mail, but no original copy.

Weeks pass and I call to check on the status of the title, each time my phone number gets taken down but no one returns my call. I escalate to the branch manager on May 10th who says I need to get the title from the department of drivers services and she will sign off on the lein once I get it. This seemed odd as I was under the impression that you cannot get a title with a lien on it.

I call the county office and they tell me I need a lien release in order to obtain the title. I call the branch manager back and she says she has never heard of such a thing. On May 31st, I go to my local tax commissioner’s office (the bank branch is not local as I have moved) and they tell me the same thing the other county office told me.

I call [the bank branch manager] again and she’s aghast that they’re requiring a lien release to get the title. On June 1st, the branch manager informs me that the lien release will be mailed to me and I should receive it no later than the next week, the next Friday to be specific. June 8th comes and goes and I still have no paperwork, I call her the following Monday, June 11th and she tells me it would be 10-15 days, this is conflicting with the information she relayed to me earlier. She again took my phone number and did not return my call. To get my point across I decided to type a letter and have my mother, who is local to the bank, drop it off. The branch manager then called after the letter was dropped off, saying that Regions Bank corporate mailed the documents on June 12th (12 days after she said they would be mailed) and would FedEx a COPY to me.

I am sending you this tip because my aunt and mother went to another local bank and their VP and branch manager actually got the paperwork that they needed to get the replacement title. They were able to obtain these documents online! Something that has taken me almost 6 months to get, took them 10 minutes!

To top it off, this new branch manager informed my family that the title was most likely not lost in the mail as titles are not mailed out with liens on them, the lien was never taken off. I have been lied to on multiple occasions by the employees of Regions Bank and they obviously do not know the workings of auto loans and titles, especially at this particular branch. And the fact that another local branch had to tell us the information is astonishing! Why can’t Regions Bank be truthful and own up to their own shortcomings?

Because that would require admitting that they have shortcomings, and that they have employees incapable of performing pretty basic tasks.

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