monsoon store card

pipsi_2

When i received my most recent bill it included a letter stating, 'as you know you can no longer use your card for purchases..... from next month you will receive bills from Santander cards who are now dealing with your account'.

I was aware that a few months ago the card was no longer dealt with by GE Money and had been taken over by Santander, but i was not aware that they were no longer offering the store card service. I haven't used my card for a long time so it's not much of an issue but i had planned on keeping the account open as i have a bad credit rating and this card has been paid on time and much more than the minimum payment so it's a good thing to keep going to improve my rating again. There's only about £160 owing on the card so once i'd paid it off i had planned on doing the occasional purchase and paying off the balance straight away to keep the card going.

Also in with my bill was a flyer about the Monsoon Rewards card, informing my i will receive one shortly, but from what i can gather it isn't another store card, just a loyalty card similar to Nectar or Tesco's Clublcard.

Is there anyone out there who has one of these cards? Did you receive any other notification that the card could no longer be used. I don;t think i even got a letter stating they had been bought by Santander, the first time i realised was when the payment details had changed.

fozmcfc

It seems the Monsoon store card was withdrawn in Sept 2009

It says so in the paragraph above the title Watch out for added extras

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/consumer_affairs/article6840803.ece

pipsi_2

Thanks for the link, i had no idea it had happened that long ago, i think i only noticed at the beginning of the year, i used to just send a cheque every month so mustn't have noticed the change back when it happened. When i realised it had changed i started paying online with my debit card via the Santander cards website as it saves the cost of a stamp.

fozmcfc

Yep I have a Burton's card, I'm sure I did receive a leaflet through the door to say that Santander were taking over or too introduce themselves after they took over.

Could never ever see how to pay the Burtons card online before Santander took over, despite the fact that the back of the statement said you could.

I rarely use my card anyway nowadays so they reduced the limit from £1200 to £200 which didn't bother me anyway.

pipsi_2

There hasn't been any change to my APR and my credit limit is the same as it always was, i've had the card for about 6ish years now, it was increased after a year or so but i never spent enough on the card to get to the first limit never mind the second so the change never bothered me either.

When i opened the card it was because i was buying a ball gown and back then they had a scheme for card holders where they could apply for the difference between the price they bought an item for and the final sale price, the procedure for getting the refund was obviously quite awkward, and i guess many people opened the card with the intention of doing that but then never get round to it. I always went through the process and i ended up getting a refund of around £150 on the £200 ball gown. I claimed back a small fortune over the years the scheme was running. Unfortunately they withdrew the scheme a few years ago.

Like i mentioned before i rarely use the card nowadays, probably haven't bought anything on it for a good 18 months or so, but it was nice to know it was there for the occasions when i wanted to buy something like a new ball gown and didn't have the money to fork out £200+ in one go.