If you are thinking of switching to Macquarie Bank you may want to think twice about it, because getting money into an account is easy, getting your own money money out is a total nightmare with the business using security issues as a means to get out of even the most basic of customer services.

This is a bank that so committed to customer service that as of May 2024, the bank is eliminating their customer service counters at their Sydney headquarters, with customers now at the mercy of their totally inefficient customer engagement system, which is more about raking in more profits at a bank that reported a net profit of $1.42 billion for the six months to 30 September 2023.

Recently I wanted to transfer over $130,000 to an account in Melbourne from an account that was holding funds in excess of the transfer request.

I was told by an online consultant that I had to fill in a withdrawal form, which they forwarded to me, and I duly filled in and signed it.

One week later I realised that the money had not been transferred out my account.

And because they have a manic obsession with digital only communication, which in itself is the root cause for most of the banking frauds today they sent a notification informing me that I had to re-sign a form as they did not accept am Acrobat PDF signature.

The notification had in fact gone into my spam folder.

So, I did the next best thing I went to their Sydney head office where after several minutes a customer service agent finally turned up.

After presenting the originally form requesting the transfer, I again resigned the form in front of the Macquarie employee, I also presented my passport.

A few minutes later and while I was still with the Macquarie executive, I received another confirmation of my request via the Macquarie Bank Authenticator, which I acknowledged.
I was told the transfer would take 2 hours.

Returning to my office, I noticed another email message from the bank claiming that I had to undertake another round of online processes.

The email stated:
Thank you for sending in your recent withdrawal request.
You can make withdrawals under $100,000 securely via our online and mobile banking platforms.
Because you can do this digitally, we no longer accept withdrawals made via form, email or paper for amounts of $100,000 or less.
This excludes form requests for cheque payments, which we’ll continue accepting.
If you’d like to complete your withdrawal via Macquarie Online Banking, we’ve provided some instructions below.

The email arrived 40 minutes after I left the bank where I was assured that there were no problems and that the transfer would go through.

Then came the next nightmare, a call to their so called customer support line resulted in being told over 130 times that “We are sorry for the delay, your call will be answered shortly, our staff are currently assisting other clients.

An hour and 20 minutes later, I was still left hanging on by a bank that that is raking in billions.

Upon returning to their customer service centre in Sydney I was told that the email indicating an ‘error with the transfer’ was sent in error by the bank.

When we showed the customer service executive that we had been forced to come back to the bank after waiting on for an over 80 minutes they said, “That does not surprise me”.

And in another case of shocking customer service, I recently applied for a loan from Macquarie Bank. Three times one of their so called loan executives who are more online jocks than serious customer service executives said they would come back to me.

They never did despite several emails back and forth.

A woman holding a phone in a well lit room with the Macquaire bank app open on a transactions screen.

One call to another competitor and we had the loan confirmed in three days. The loan was backed by no debt and multimillion dollars’ worth of properties that had no borrowings.
Remember this is the bank that claims they have great rates, low fees and fast approval times.

“More good borrowers are choosing a Macquarie home loan” they claim.

Maybe if they offered better customer service they would get a lot more business, but then again if the treatment I have received from this so called top end of town bank is anything to go by, you may want to think again about engaging with them.

A search of several rating sites tells the story of what customers actually think of Macquarie Bank customer service.