Barclays

A modern reimagined branch by Barclays after closing the other two dated ones, to the disappointment of many customers that had the George street closer to their location /​office .
They boast five self service machines for a wide range of transactions.
You do need to go to the cashier for Euro currency deposits. If you have a euro currency account then you can only withdraw money from it Mon to Fri, not on Saturdays. You may deposit money on Saturdays but they will reach your account the following Monday due to that department only open M to F.
It is a quite busy branch during lunch time and Saturdays so keep that in mind if you need to visit it.
I do hope they had one extra person for handling customer transactions on a desk, so only three stars in my review. Yes you can do better Barclays if you want to.

Barclay’s has been my UK bank for a fair bit of time now, nearly 9 years if i want to be exact. I’ve persevered with them as i felt like i got fairly good service (bar one incident where they lost a cheque i was trying to deposit) and they were one of the few banks that were not bailed out by the government back in 2008 when the economy took a steep dive downhill. with all the hassle involved in changing a bank and despite there only being two Barclay’s branches in edinburgh i stuck with them.
and then in what i’m assuming they thought a moment of genius they decided to combine their two branches into what i would assume is one super branch in a brand new shop location next to the apple store on prince street. so big new shiny branch with even extended opening hours on a saturday (yes they are open til 3pm!). this all sounds good, but for the number of times i’ve been there i’ve never been able to complete any banking transaction in under 15 minutes. simple things like moving funds from my ISA to my current account or getting international money when i’m going travelling. and why is there a wait you may ask? well in their stroke of genius to create this super branch they decided to get 4 self service do it all computer tellers. they are fairly handy even if the touch screens are a bit rubbish and it takes me ten minutes to type in someone’s account details to transfer them money. but the really annoyance which is the main cause for my two star review is that they now only have two real live teller desks. TWO! and the queue for these desks is at least a half hour wait at any time during the day. i’ve been stood there for 45 minutes waiting to get to the front of the line with my annoyance clearly being felt by the rest of my company in the queue.
i have to say reducing the number of tellers when combining banks was probably one of the daftest things i’ve ever seen. yes the electronic tellers are useful but the majority of people that walk into the bank need to see an actual person so it’s just a bit shocking how Barclay’s have really missed this important bit when setting up the new branch. yes i realise this sounds a bit ranty, but when you’ve spend 30 minutes queuing for two minutes of a teller’s time you may find yourself a bit ranty as well. seriously Barclay’s get it sorted!