RBS - hopelessly inefficient, or sneakily greedy?

We moved our current account from RBS (after 25 years: having bombarded us with questionnaires every time we went into a branch, when we left, they showed no interest in finding out why we had gone).

A few months later, someone refunded a payment to the now-closed account.

It would be too much to hope that the banking industry had thought of such an occurrence and designed an automatic procedure to route the funds to the new account.

Instead, RBS wrote to us (by post) and asked us to contact them about how we could get hold of the money - a whole £4.80.

When we didn't get around to calling them, they wrote again. So I did call - could I come in to the branch so that they could hand me the £4.80? No, I couldn't. The assistant seemed out of options here, but I gave her the sort code and account number for the new account and insisted that they must have the means to transfer the funds electronically. The assistant wasn't sure this was possible, went away for a few minutes, and then came back to say she thought she had found a way.

A week or so later an envelope arrived with a cheque payable to us jointly.

So, after two letters and 10 minutes of staff time (not counting my wasted time), they did what they could have done in the first place.

Are they hopelessly inefficient, or is this a deliberate policy: relying on intertia to allow them to pocket the funds from the substantial proportion of customers who don't get their act together to jump through the required hoops?