We realise that people on the mainland often confuse Isle of Wight with Isle of Man, but this confusion by a large finance company had us all scratching our heads.
A VB reader who prefers to remain anonymous recently had a credit card application rejected by Capital One.
They were told that for ‘legal reasons’ the application was being rejected because they lived outside ‘mainland UK’.
They tell us, “When we rang up, the call centre was adamant that it wasn’t a mistake, I tried to explain that we were an indivisible part of the UK, not an overseas territory, even with an MP, but to no avail. I’m guessing given the accent on the other end it was an overseas call centre and maybe the applications are handled there too – could be that some education on UK geography is required.”
Oops!
Hoping to help get to the bottom of the confusion, we got in touch with Capital One. They instantly told us that they did consider applications from the Isle of Wight.
“Hopefully we can fix it as we do accept applications from the Isle of Wight.” they said.
With all the necessary details they went off to investigate the situation and came back to us a couple of weeks later saying, “I just wanted to let you know that we managed to resolve this case, and it did in fact turn out to be an error on our part.”
Application now accepted
The VB reader in question confirmed a little while later, “We finally got an acceptance letter in the post. An apology given for their ‘error’ but unfortunately no explanation of why it occurred.
“Would be interesting to know if it was human error in one of their processing centres or whether their vetting or IT system was at fault. If either of the latter it might have some implications for other providers that use the same vetting tools or postcode databases.”
We’d be interested to hear from you if you’ve had similar problems. Hopefully this one was just down to human error.
