Free £20 John Lewis Voucher With An HSBC Online Saver

MSE_Martin

What's the deal?

Open an HSBC online saver before 19 November, deposit £500 and you will be sent a £20 John Lewis voucher.

The interest rate on the account is 4.75% (the rate goes up to 5% on 5 December), which is reasonable though still about 0.5% down on the best buy account ICICI* (see top savings article) and it won't pay interest in any month you withdraw cash.

Yet for this limited amount of money and over only a couple of months, the amount you forgo in interest compared the best buy is miniscule (roughly 30p for a basic rate taxpayer, much less than the voucher!)

What to do

Simply dump the £500 in within 14 days of opening the account, wait to receive the voucher which should be sent at the end of January. After that you could keep the savings in there (especially if you had a worse paying account previously), or to be a MoneySaving nerd you could close the account and move the money to somewhere and then ditch the account for a better paying one.

Go to the HSBC Site for full t&cs

Martin

--Tony--

Is this open to existing customers?

Hanxx

That's got to be worth doing for £20!

gt94sss2

--Tony-- wrote:

Is this open to existing customers?

You are only allowed to have one HSBC Online Saver account at a time.

Existing HSBC Online Saver account customers would need to close their existing account and then open a new one.

Regards
Sunil

littlemissmoney

Does the £500 have to stay in the account until you get the £20? (Obviously I will withdraw it on the 1st of a month).

gt94sss2

littlemissmoney wrote:

Does the £500 have to stay in the account until you get the £20? (Obviously I will withdraw it on the 1st of a month).

HSBC have run this offer several times - in the past they have offered £20 cash or most recently £20 M&S vouchers... this time its John Lewis ones!

As such their are several previous threads (like this one) where you can read about what HSBC have indicated would happen if you left £1 in the account or empted it etc.

Regards
Sunil

Diane_MacRae

Couple of problems...
1. Just completed initial application form and it said they'll tell me within 5
days if it's accepted (or if further ID is required). If they do take this long, and certainly if they want more ID, it'll be after the closing date of the offer (19th Nov), so no doubt they won't hand over the £20 voucher, as I actually haven't yet given them my deposit.

2. In the application form they require you to enter full details of a credit card, including the 3-digit security number on the back! Even though the form has an option to say 'no credit card', the verification process still throws it back as an error if you don't enter all the card details. I entered bogus numbers as I was not willing to give them this info - the deposit has to come from a debit card anyway, so why should they want all your credit card details?

stormCat99

Diane_MacRae - don't worry it shouldn't be a problem about the delay in accepting your application. The Ts and Cs for the offer state:

You must submit an application online for an Online Saver account between 12.01am Monday 6th November 2006 and 11:59pm Sunday 19th November

So you have met this requirement by applying for the account between those datetimes. How long they now take to process the application and open the account should not be relevant

metaphase

As long as the full a/c opening occurs by 19th December you'll be fine. In full para 3 of their T&Cs say...

In order to be eligible for the £20 gift voucher;
• you must submit an application online for an Online Saver account between 12.01am Monday 6th November 2006 and 11:59pm Sunday 19th November, and
• such application must subsequently be accepted by us, and
• the account must have been opened and all account opening formalities must have been completed by 19th December 2006, including the execution of any required documentation, any funding or activation requirements (NB minimum deposit of £500 required) and the provision of any documents required for identification or address verification purposes [within 7 days of account opening], and
• any cancellation period applicable to the product must have expired.

With regards 'cancellation period' then the safe bet would be to leave the £500 in the a/c until you receive the voucher I would have thought.

Cheers

Alan

TheDink

At the end of the application, it says they will email to confirm receipt - but I haven't received a message. Then it goes on to say I will be informed of the result of my application in 5 days. Has anyone else had this problem?

I guess that the credit card details are part of their online identification procedures - on the first page they also asked for driving licence number and electricity account number. I think these are all things they can check with a credit reference agency to confirm your ID.

new

MSE_Martin wrote:

What's the deal?

Open an HSBC online saver before 19 November, deposit £500 and you will be sent a £20 John Lewis voucher.

The interest rate on the account is 4.75% (the rate goes up to 5% on 5 December), which is reasonable though still about 0.5% down on the best buy account ICICI* (see top savings article) and it won't pay interest in any month you withdraw cash.

Yet for this limited amount of money and over only a couple of months, the amount you forgo in interest compared the best buy is miniscule (roughly 30p for a basic rate taxpayer, much less than the voucher!)

What to do

Simply dump the £500 in within 14 days of opening the account, wait to receive the voucher which should be sent at the end of January. After that you could keep the savings in there (especially if you had a worse paying account previously), or to be a MoneySaving nerd you could close the account and move the money to somewhere and then ditch the account for a better paying one.

Go to the HSBC Site for full t&cs

Martin

:beer: Thank you Martin for this and all the very useful tips on your extremely helpful website - having been recommending to lots of friends!:money: