Two months' notice to close the company account and they will not say why

Letter arrived Saturday. Sixty days' notice, the account will be closed, no reason given beyond a clause reference in the terms that lets them close for any reason or none. Nine years with them, no arrears, no disputes.

I have spent a career on the other side of conversations like this and I still cannot get a human on the phone; the relationship manager has stopped replying and the branch says it is not a branch matter. Mid five figures sits in it and payroll runs from it on the 28th.

I know the answer to "why" is probably that there is no answer I will be given. What I would like from people who have actually been through it is the sequence: what happens in week one, what happens at day sixty, and what happens to the balance.

they can't tell you. if they told you it would be tipping off and that is the one part of this that is actually a criminal offence for them, so the person you're chasing is legally required to say nothing and knows it

stop spending the sixty days trying to get a reason. spend them exporting nine years of statements before the login dies, because it dies on the day, not after

Treat this as a record that now exists about you rather than an event that happened to you.

The closure is visible to the group, and in most markets to a shared industry database as well. Applying to a sister brand of the same group is a pre-declined application that also refreshes the record. Check who owns who before you apply anywhere.

Open the replacement now, while you still have an operating account to show and statements you can download. An applicant with a live account is a different proposition to an applicant who was closed six weeks ago and cannot say why.

Wait they can just do that?! With no reason at all?? Nine years!

Yes.

I have watched four of these from close enough to take notes. The sequence is remarkably consistent, and almost all the damage people take comes from the same three or four avoidable moves rather than from the closure itself.

Week one: extract, do not argue

Everything you can read today, you may not be able to read on day sixty-one. Download the full statement history as PDF and as CSV, every standing order and direct debit mandate, every payee on the list with full details, and any facility or loan documentation. Do it this week. Access is usually cut on the closure date without warning, and requesting historic statements from a closed account afterwards is a paid, slow, and occasionally refused process.

Then inventory what is attached to the account, because this is where people get hurt: payroll, tax payments, card acquiring settlement, subscriptions billing to the debit card, any supplier who has your details on file for a direct debit. Each one needs a new destination and each one takes a different amount of time to move.

Weeks one to three: open two, not one

Apply at two institutions in unrelated groups, at the same time. Two because one of them will take longer than promised and one of them may decline you, and you will not know which until late. Expect the new onboarding to be heavier than the account you are losing — the same underwriting climate that produced your letter produced their questionnaire.

When they ask why you are moving, the answer is that you are moving. You are under no obligation to volunteer that you were exited and volunteering it will not go well.

Day sixty and the balance

On the date, the account stops accepting credits and online access goes. The remaining balance is not usually withheld — the normal outcome is a transfer to a nominated account or a cheque, generally within one to three weeks. The exception, and it is the one to plan around, is that the exit and a hold are two separate decisions made by two separate teams. Which brings me to the thing not to do.

What turns an exit into a freeze

Do not empty the account in one movement the day after the letter arrives. A single large outbound transfer immediately following an exit notice is precisely the behaviour pattern that gets escalated, and an escalation replaces your orderly sixty days with an indefinite hold that has no notice period at all. Run the balance down through normal operating payments and move the residual near the end.

Also: card acquiring is a separate contract with a separate timeline, and it does not automatically die with the bank account. In two of the four cases I watched, acquiring was pulled six to twelve weeks after the bank exit, by a different company, for the same unstated reason. Plan for it rather than being surprised by it.

Caveat on all of the above: everything I have seen was UK and EU. I do not know how much of the sequence transfers elsewhere, and the tipping-off constraint that makes the silence mandatory is jurisdiction-specific.

Short version: export everything this week, open two replacements immediately, and drain the balance slowly.

Solid, except for the part where everyone tells the person not to bother appealing.

Complain in writing, exhaust the internal process, then take it to the ombudsman. I have watched two of these get reversed. It costs a letter and eight weeks of somebody else's time, and you are opening the new accounts in parallel anyway.

two reversed out of how many watched. you're the one who asks everyone else that question

you're selling a lottery ticket as a strategy and the ticket costs him attention he needs elsewhere for sixty days

Two out of nine. That is not a lottery, that is better than one in five, and the cost is one letter written once.

I would still open the replacements first. I am not telling him to wait on it. I am telling him not to skip it because a forum told him it never works.