Icesave-please help/advice!!!!

herbie72

Just spoken to someone on the Icesave customer services desk, and she said that all the staff there have been assured they'll keep their jobs. So that's interesting. She said they've all been really worried, but there's a sense of relief round there atm.

Make of that as you will :think:

Scooby64

herbie72 wrote: »

Just spoken to someone on the Icesave customer services desk, and she said that all the staff there have been assured they'll keep their jobs. So that's interesting. She said they've all been really worried, but there's a sense of relief round there atm.

Make of that as you will :think:

Aren't Icesave's UK Opps run by someone else (Newcastle BS I think??). If so, under UK employment law, they can't be dismissed just because their "client" has gone bust. It would be like Heinz sacking the Tesco account manager if Tesco went bust.

That isn't to say there won't be job losses, only that they will have to have a period of consultation and pick staff to go from the whole pool, not just the ones working on the Icesave account

Scooby64

I see the panic mongers & know-it-alls from yesterday haven't been back. That goes to show they had no interest either in Icesave or in helping those affected with advice.

It's despicable that some people gain enjoyment from the misery of others

favemuppet

Is this promising?????

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKTRE4977RV20081008

neverdespairgirl

Scooby64 wrote: »

Aren't Icesave's UK Opps run by someone else (Newcastle BS I think??). If so, under UK employment law, they can't be dismissed just because their "client" has gone bust.

They could, it would be redundancy. The staffing levels no longer needed.

Scooby64

favemuppet wrote: »

Is this promising?????

http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKTRE4977RV20081008

I think it must have lost something in translation. For a start I couldn't understand why their PM would tell Darling he had no intention of paying the UK claims. That ammounts to "P1ss Off!" and International Law and public opinion would not support them.

Now to say

"good chance the assets of Landsbanki, now taken under government control, would cover deposits made by savers in Britain in IceSave"

is crazy talk - even if true, they can't use them to pay out the British claims as this would be treating us as prefferential creditors over other savers (equally illegal)

Scooby64

neverdespairgirl wrote: »

They could, it would be redundancy. The staffing levels no longer needed.

I'm not saying that they can't be made redundant, only that as their employer is Newcastle BS (assuming it is) and not Icesave, they aren't automatically redundant. They would need to have the consultation exercise.

It could still be that the "Icesave" staff go - if the selection was made on the basis of knowledge and skills, it could be argued that the "Icesave" staff score worse than the NBS staff (if the systems aren't identical).

They still have to go through the process and consider other options (retraining, voluntary redundancy etc)

v6g

Some important points that haven't been mentioned in the 40+ pages of comments:

1) The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) was complicit in the IceSave debacle due to:

- Despite being repeatedly asked over recent months: "What happens if the Icelandic Government can't pay?", they refused to answer that question until yesterday. Yet they continued to license the bank to operate in the UK and allowed them to advertise.

- By placing the responsibility upon British savers of understanding and judging the risk of a default by another sovereign nation demonstrates ineptitude and negligence.

- Any potential IceSave customer who did their "due diligence" and consulted the FSA register via their website would have found the phrase "EEA Authorised". Yet, there is no explanation of what this means. Anyone doing their homework would reasonably assume (by lack of any further information) that "EEA Authorised" means "100% safe" when it actually means the opposite. I challenge anyone to look up IceSave on the FSA Register (and it's still registered at the time of this posting) and find an explanation of "EEA Authorised" on the FSA register website.

2) The interest rate on a deposit is NOT a definitive measure of risk. The rate that an institution chooses to pay is determined by many factors, which include:

- The business strategy of the institution
- The marketplace competition
- The targetted consumer segment
- Anticipated customer inertia
- Short-term incentives

3) Many savers with IceSave have fixed-term accounts that were opened before any of the credit crunch even started. Just over a year ago, it was unheard of for a retail-deposit bank in a developed nation to fail. Realistically, the risk simply didn't exist.

4) Anyone who says that IceSave savers should have known the risk, and so should lose everything, is assuming that the majority of British retail savers understand what a credit default swap (CDS) is and should be able to correctly predict the decline of the CDS of the Icelandic Krona - which is pure nonsense. It is crucial to the UK economy that British savers know that their money is safe in a British-regulated bank. No half-measures, it either is or it isn't.

If anything needs to change after this, then it should be this:

- The FSA must either:-

i) Clarify precisely and publicise which banks & accounts are not 100% covered and regulate so that these accounts are not allowed to compete with 100% guaranteed banks nor market their products without clearly identifying the difference (in league table etc...), or,

ii) End the practise of "EEA Authorisation" - a bank is either safe or it isn't. The consumer should not be required to gauge the risk of another countries Government finances. The FSA is far better placed to determine the risk than the consumer. The FSCS would then charge more for the deposit insurance premiums from banks that it determines to be of higher risk. This is how it works in the US & Canada.

- The FSA must improve the clarity of their online register to include a precise explanation of the meaning of the term "EEA Authorised".

Scooby64

v6g wrote: »

Some important points that haven't been mentioned in the 40+ pages of comments:

1) The UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) was complicit in the IceSave debacle due to......

All of that's true, and I think they know it - that's why they stepped up and guaranteed ALL savings even those above the threshold.

That said, I think that decision could come back to bite them because they have now set a precident for ALL deposits being guaranteed, even above £50K and even in overseas (UK regulated) banks.

Effectively they now have to guarantee ALL savings, but for political reasons (upsetting the other EU members) they can't come out and say so!

mr_jetlag

Scooby64 wrote: »

Effectively they now have to guarantee ALL savings, but for political reasons (upsetting the other EU members) they can't come out and say so!

Well, AD did cover his backside by saying these were exceptional circumstances etc. etc... but does anyone really believe that if an Abbey or a Natwest fails that the BoE won't step in to guarantee their savers 100% as well? In some ways that might actually be preferable as it could drive overseas savers into the arms of British banks and the UK (unlike Ireland) actually has a large enough GDP to make good on the guarantee... at least for the first one or two "Universal banks".