I’m sure you’ve been at a dinner party and at some point during the evening someone mentions a bad experience with a bank. It’s like opening the flood gates as everyone round the table will have a story to tell. Unfortunately I’m not able to tell you that a business can run without a bank as it can’t! Unless you’re stuffing all your cash under the floor boards.

Are banks all the same or should you be using the same criteria as a normal supplier to choose who to work with?

In my view this is true to a certain degree and in the current economic climate banks are hard work. We have taken a slightly strange approach to choosing our bank.

We are going with HSBC not for the fact I think they are a great bank but because I’ve banked with them as a business for 5 years. Another deciding factor is all my co-directors also bank with HSBC. As we are on a tight time frame we are able to open an account very quickly as we are known customers of the bank.

Due to the time constraints on us to open the account it seemed important to open a bank account with the least number of hurdles. HSBC like all banks are wary of new businesses but having a proven business banking trading history and personal banking trading history goes along way. This shows the bank that we can keep within facilities, how much we have in the account and what risk they are exposed to from the get go.

This will be my forth business bank account with HSBC so I know how to fill out the forms, what to expect from their team and the hurdles I need to cross.

In the long terms will we stay with HSBC? I doubt it unless our business grows drastically to over £1 million. The major problems I had with HSBC are that unless you are a sizable business they really don’t care and are faceless in communicating with their customers. When you need something from them you have a long drawn out process and no ability for them to be flexible. Business colleagues who are running large turnover businesses can’t speak highly enough of HSBC as a personal bank manager is appointed. Until you get to this point you are going to feel very lonely. It’s very likely once the business has a trading history of just 3-4 months we will move our banking facilities.

I don’t want to open the flood gates but I would like to hear from other small businesses on arranging their banking.