Best bank for self employed?

jontuch

Hiya

I am going self employed in a few weeks and would like to know what is the best bank to hold a business account. I currently hold an account with Lloyds but would like a seperate account for all business income and expenditure.

Anyone know a good choice to go for?

Many thanks

from a soon to be youth work trainer

Kilty_2

If you are going for a business account then Abbey provide fee free business banking for life.

No counter access though as far as I know, you need to pay in cash / cheques by either using their ATM or their postal service.

Snow_Dog

Depends on what sort of transactions you will be doing, a lot of banks Lloyds included witll offer startups free banking for so many years, Lloyds is 1st year free, 2nd year 50% discount (as far as I remember), co-op will offer free banking as do others.

The one thing to watch out for however is while they profess to offer free banking there are still charges for certain transactions, for example if you are receiving CHAPS payments from the EU then Lloyds will only charge the receiver £7 however a lot of the FREE banks are charging £20 plus, a couple of these and your FREE banking could start to mount up.

The other thing to take into account is if you will be using online services, imho Lloyds online banking is excellent, cannot really fault it, also their counter service, business advisers and customer service is good.

A & L online business banking system is cumbersome and not that user friendly, tech support/customer service is patchy.

HSBC - Online business banking is OK, counter service excellent.

The nice thing is if you already have personal accounts with lloyds you dont lose days of interest on your money when you pay yourself, its same day transfer.