MBNA cards - a warning

chattychappy

Ultrasonic wrote: »

Reading this thread I'm actually surprised to hear how often credit card companies are apparently lenient and DON'T enforce their Ts&Cs! There is no reason why they should do this at all.

Interesting point. Three issues I can see:

1) I think alot of it is simply a cost issue. People will argue endlessly on the phone, write in, escalate to the FOS etc. Even if they ultimately lose, they will not have to pay anything back to cover the costs of all this. So if it's a case of refunding back a few quid or paying for all that staff involvement, I can see why they refund.

2) For a one-off mistake from a customer that has generated profit over a number of years, it is probably worth it from a goodwill point of view it it means retention.

3) In rare cases, they might be aware of a regulatory/legal issue which they don't wanted tested, brought to the attention of the authorities or cause a change in regime. It might make commercial sense to "pay customers off" rather than have something unravel.

gglaze

Rupert_Bear wrote: »

I do not understand why these very busy people do not just up a direct debit. I have mine in place for the min payment and never have any issues.

No idea about other busy people, but in my case this is the reason:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3955713

bengal-stripe

Rupert_Bear wrote: »

I do not understand why these very busy people do not just up a direct debit. I have mine in place for the min payment and never have any issues.

gglaze wrote: »

No idea about other busy people, but in my case this is the reason:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/3955713

You can have a DD for the minimum in place, but pay additional monies through bank transfer. The same day the DD hits my account, a Faster Payment transfer goes out to the CC (set-up days in advance).

Should I forget the transfer (or if I'm short of funds in a particular month) the DD still keeps my account on the straight and narrow.

gglaze

Yeah, I've thought about that, just always seemed silly to do a separate payment when often it's just going to be another £1 or so... I mean honestly this has only been a problem a handful of times for me - say in like the last 10 years, accross 10 separate cards, I've missed maybe 4 or 5 times at most. That's a 0.4% miss rate. But I guess anything worse than 0% isn't great if there is no more leniency.

gglaze

Also, just to point out, this has never been a problem for me with my cards in the US, because there are services such as Bank of America Online BillPay with "e-Bill" service, which keeps track of all my cards for me. This service receives "e-Bills" from each of my cards each month, sends me an email and notifies me when they come in, which is basically the day the card statement comes out, which is 10-20 days in advance of the payment being due. If I do nothing, the min payment will be made automatically on the last possible day. But I can log on any time before then and adjust the payment amount (i.e. add on another $1 or round it up or whatever) and also adjust the payment date (i.e. go ahead and pay it immediately instead of waiting until the due date). Since it's all centrally managed, and all electronic, and quite a nice easy website to use, it just works.

Not sure if there is any similar service in the UK, or any online banking which offers any service like this.

Bank of America (US) even captures my UK credit card bills through another service on their website called "My Portfolio" and notifies me when these are coming due, alongside all my US bills. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for all of them - hence the two I sometimes overlook, Opus (formerly Citi) and Tesco finance. It does do the MBNA and Barclays ones fine though.

Guess this is just the "lazy American" attitude or whatever, but wouldn't it be great if things in the UK weren't so difficult sometimes. Maybe someone has experience with a similar system in the UK, which even works with Opus and Tesco? Or I guess everyone just sets up their DD's and leaves it at that...