My name is Len Boffey and I am a Personal Account Manager for Debt Advice Ireland. Yesterday I was dealing with a client who has 2 accounts with Bank of Ireland at one of their Kildare branches.

One of the accounts is a loan . At the moment these accounts are up to date with no missed payments , but our client is no longer able to make the required contractual payments, so when the next payment falls due and is not made, BOI's management of the account will pass to the Bank's Credit Operations department in Dublin. The difficulty I normally face in this type of situation with any of the Irish banks is who to contact to discuss the clients circumstances and hopefully get them to agree to a reduced repayment programme. When I contact the branch they invariably do not pass the information on to the relevant Credit Operations department and if I contact the Credit Operations department it takes them such a long time to actually receive the account from the branch and set the account up on their system and allocate a member of staff to "manage" the account ,that often our paperwork tends to go missing and valuable time is wasted.

Well yesterday was a pleasant surprise. I spoke to a very helpful lady at the branch and she contacted the Credit Operations centre, identified who would be managing the account when it passes to them and then came back to me with their contact details. I was able to call them and give them the outline of our client's current circumstances. The Credit Operations account manager will be reviewing the accounts in the next couple of days and then get back to me. So hopefully by us working together we can reach a speedy and mutually agreeable solution.

What a nice change from the normal run around of recorded messages ,giving lots of useless options to press numbers and messages telling me how important my call is, but never getting through to someone who can actually help me.

Well done Bank Of Ireland!