Intelligent? I'm losing interest

My partner Stephen and I have been trying to open an Isa with Intelligent Finance for more than two months now. IF has proved incredibly slow in processing the application and almost impossible to contact to find out what's going on.

We both applied for IF mini cash Isas on 17 January for £3,000 each. Since then, IF has contacted us to request further information once (it needed proof of ID from Stephen from two separate institutions, and we had sent bills from the same one) and has sent various documents concerning the two accounts. All this - which I would have expected to take a couple of weeks - has taken two months to do.

Crucially, the Isas themselves have still not been started: the cheques have not been cashed and the money remains sitting idle in our current account, even though there's just three weeks to the end of the tax year and the loss of this year's Isa allowance.

I have tried several times to chase this up, both by phone and email, but to no avail.

We chose IF because it offered the best rate of interest, but at a rough calculation, the amount I've lost as my money sits in a current account brings the return I'd get for my first year's saving down from 4.6 per cent (the advertised rate) to well under 4 per cent.

A very similar thing happened to me last year when I tried to open a Safeway Isa, which, like the IF Isa, was offering the best rate at the time. In the end, I got so frustrated with the wait that I ended up cancelling my cheque, and, of course, incurring a fee.

Both these incidents illustrate the problems banks have when they underestimate demand for a product and fail to plan accordingly. In Safeway's defence, I should say that I applied nearer the April deadline - that was why I thought January would be safe from the last-minute panic. Obviously I was wrong.

'We have stopped product advertising'

IF says: The delay experienced by our customer
is clearly unacceptable and we apologise
unreservedly for this. We will backdate the
cheques to the date they were lodged with us to
ensure that Hannah and Stephen lose no interest.

As Intelligent Finance offers offset banking
products, when customers apply for an Isa with
us, they then have easy access to other products
such as a mortgage or credit card. As a result, we
undertake the necessary anti-money-laundering
and 'Know your Customer' activities at the initial
application stage.

We have been experiencing a phenomenal
volume of Isa applications and have taken the
unusual step of refusing Isa applications from 24
March to enable us to process those we already
have. We have stopped product advertising and
arranged for the Isa to stop appearing in Best Buy
tables.

Due to the high volume of calls and applications,
we have been recruiting heavily and last week 50
new staff came out of training. We have another
150 due to finish their training in the next few
weeks.