When I heard about Coutts & Co. I wanted to be their customer.
But what was the point in having an account in Sterling in London when you live in Hawaii? So my desire to have white cheques imprinted with my name (not simply “Craig W. Walsh,” but “Craig W. Walsh, Esq.”) would need to wait.
It was my good fortune in April 1986 to marry Marjorie. Beautiful, charming, English, and a Lloyds Bank customer. My chance had come to correspond with the gentlemen at Coutts in London. I wrote to Coutts from our home on Maui, and they responded promptly with all the necessary paperwork. Marjorie and I filled the forms out, signed and returned them, and suddenly we were customers of the Queen’s own bank.
Sheet 1 of our Coutts bank statements reflects that our account was opened on May 21, 1986, less than a month after we were married.
We moved to England in June of that year, and started a financial services business (with money borrowed from a high-interest finance company, but that’s another story) in October. By 1992 we’d sold a minority interest in our company to a NYSE-listed corporation, and in 1996 we sold the rest. At that time, our company employed 515 people in five countries. The wire transfers from the purchaser — millions of pounds —went to our friends at Coutts.
Over the years, we deposited many millions with Coutts. And, at other times, they lent us substantial sums. They invested our company’s pension fund. They invested our own funds. We used their credit cards. Our farm banked with them. We’d even flown our account manager to Hawaii to see our business there.
On April 2 2004, we sold a residential property, and the funds were (of course) sent to Coutts. This paid off all of our debt to the Bank, and left our own house and 57 acres of farm free of encumbrances. We’d never missed a payment to Coutts, and dealt with our account manager and his colleagues regularly, usually by e-mail.
Our account manager, Stephen Cannons, telephoned me on April 28 to say that the Bank wanted to close all of our accounts. Stephen explained that we were entitled to 30 days’ notice, but the bank would give us until June 1 to move our personal and business banking relationships elsewhere. An overall relationship of almost 18 years.
As I set about making contact with other banks and filling out their forms, I kept thinking about how unfair this was. And I started to recall the story of Bally Sucks.
Andrew Faber signed up for a health club membership at Bally Total Fitness some years ago, and things went wrong. Andrew explains, “In October of 2001 I got a call from some Collection Agency representative who was so rude that I cannot even describe it. He screamed at me and kept insulting me. He said that I should get of my lazy ass and pay them money I owe to Bally Total Fitness.” Andrew was sure that a call or two to Bally would resolve everything, but it didn’t. In the end he even paid them money he didn’t owe, and still they made a derogatory report to the credit reporting agency.
Andrew said, “I felt beaten. [ … ] I did everything they asked me to do and I still got screwed. Finally it came to me. I will cost this company thousands of times more money than I paid to collection agency. I will let the world know about their business practices. Hence my friends, you are looking at this site.”
Bally sued. The Courts said that Andrew’s site was “consumer commentary,” and dismissed Bally’s claims. In their judgment, the Court quoted Justice Brandeis: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not the enforcement of silence.”
So, in the tradition of
- www.ballysucks.net and
- www.paypalsucks.com and
- www.milksucks.com and
- www.fencingsucks.com and
- www.metricsucks.com and
- www.smokingsucks.com and
- www.mitsubishisucks.com and
- www.allstateinsurancesucks.com and
- Microsoft sucks and
- Lord of the Rings sucks and
- www.chasebanksucks.com
(Although I like the Chase Bank: my daughter is actually named after it. Honest.) I decided to create a “consumer commentary” site of my own.
I don’t think Coutts is evil, but I think they acted unfairly towards us. They have, along the way, made large mistakes in calculating interest owed by us to them, resulting in a substantial refund. And they’ve made many other mistakes, including a dozen with the simple closure of our account. Articles about these difficulties are elsewhere on this website.
I welcome comments, suggestions, or shared experiences. To e-mail me, please click here. If you like, I’d be glad to add similar stores to this website. In the interest of “more speech, not enforced silence.”
Update – March 26, 2026 — I created this website in the summer of 2004. Coutts became aware of the site after an article about it appeared in a major Sunday newspaper in the UK. The bank had a prominent law firm write to my hosting company in the States demanding the site be taken down immediately. To their discredit, my hosting company complied — without giving me a chance to download the files. To his credit, the young man (in Hong Kong) who helped me create the website kept a complete copy. I was able to find another hosting company — one with more guts — and we had the site back up and running in about 12 hours. Coutts and its solicitors didn’t try to silence me again.
The list (above) of other “sucks” websites shows that these sites tend to be ephemeral. It’s a cathartic experience to create one, but then there’s no real benefit to maintaining it. But I felt we were treated poorly by Coutts, so I resolved to keep the website up and running — and here it is, 22 years later, still online. It previously ran on Article Manager CMS software — which hasn’t been supported in years. We have now migrated the site to a minty fresh WordPress site, hopefully giving it another 22 years of renewed life — if not longer.
I have carefully avoided using the Coutts logo anywhere on this site, and (for the avoidance of doubt) wish to make it clear that this site is not owned by, nor endorsed by, Coutts & Co. If you’re looking for their website, please click here.
Before you go to their site, you may wish to read some of the articles here. And see why I personally feel that CouttsSucks.