Then for others, and here we would like to focus upon the transgender community (although it could equally apply to the non-binary community as well), just getting the bank to provide you with the correct honorific (Mr, Mrs, Miss, Mx title) can be very hard indeed. We weren't aware of the complexities until we were informed by a child within our parents group.
What is so important about this? Surely it's just simple respect for every person. The banks customer support managers and staff and this must be a priority to ensure that their customers are given that utmost respect...
especially in the first line of the letter or email?
So we started to contact various banks. Some were keen to tell us that they were so welcoming but upon later inspection, possibly not as much as they originally thought. That's the issue: You have to come at this problem from the viewpoint as one from the transgender community, not as a cisgender official. More of that later:
So what results did we find?
RBS have said that their application forms were not ready for the title of Mx but once the account had been opened the customer could request the use of the title then. They also accepted that the application form did not suggest that this was possible. They concluded that they would be "Now taking our suggestions further but no timeframe as yet."
One quote from a RBS Support Forum stated by a #trans customer that RBS "have been really wonderful through the whole process and I highly recommend them!! in a Guardian article in May 2015, Marjorie Strachan, head of inclusion at RBS, said when a transgender customer struggled to get suitable respect through their branch : “This was a case of human error and we have contacted the customer to apologise. This should not have happened. Getting this right for customers is very important to us and we are working hard to ensure that it does not happen again."
Lloyd's Banking Group responded to our question and said that they had implemented the necessary changes but this had met with problems and the changes have been withdrawn. They are now looking into it again.
Santander had no option for the inclusion of Mx on their website but does allow it later, but we wondered whether the customer was aware of this policy on application
HSBC wrote a number of tweets back to us explaining that the necessary changes were considerable with respect to the paperwork and the IT...and were looking into this problem...
Finally Nationwide and, Barclay's have also indicated that they were very keen but were looking into it...
Just wondering whether the simple inclusion of the use of
Mx would be possible soon?