I notice that NatWest have stopped claiming to be 'Helpful banking'. Was it their decision or did the Advertising Standards Association say they couldn't? 
You really couldn't make it up! Just took a call on my mobile from them, wanting to speak to one of our sons. I explained who I was and had to work hard to convince her she could speak to me instead. The account is set up so all the family are equal.
Apparently when a person on a joint account dies they have to check that the overdraft is still affordable. Fine. Now I think the easy way to look at that is to look at the account and how it has been run and is being run but clearly it is not so simple.
I had to listen while she opened our account and did all her sums to calculate how much income we have. I even had to correct her when she failed to accurately multiply our weekly state pension by 52 and divide by 12 and came to a figure of £142 a month. Yes, I know state pensions aren't great but our combined pensions are better than that! I asked why she couldn't do all that before calling me. She didn't know. I asked her to look back over the last 50 years and see that we haven't gone into our overdraft, she couldn't do that. I asked her to look at the balance on our account (far too much but there to pay for the things one has to when someone dies) but that had no impact. I told her about our investments but she couldn't take them into account. However, when she asked me if I had other bank accounts and I said no (well they are not current accounts and I wasn't going to go into the others!) she accepted that. She asked me if I had any planned expenditure and I was so tempted to say I've got to go to the supermarket, tempted to buy new shoes, might go to the theatre etc. but I restrained myself.
OK, so we ticked the boxes but what a waste of time.
I am still waiting for them to sort out a problem from 21 August!
