Nationwide - selling ethincs?

Dirk_Gently_2

I'm literally astounded by the behaviour of someone at Nationwide on the phone just now and I'd welcome the opinion of others on it.

I was on the phone to one of their people getting a soft-quote for a loan, and he actually said "I can see from your FlexAccount that you pay <Company1> £xx.xx a month for your car insurance and <Company2> £xx.xx a month for your home insurance. Would you like us to try and beat that...."

Is that legal, because in my book it's certainly utterly unethical. We were talking about a loan so he was authorised to look at figures with regard to that and that only - but he was using privileged access to my bank account for other purposes, trying to sell-on additional products I hadn't expressed any interest in. That rings really loud alarm bells ring for me.

Am I being unduly sensitive here, or am I right in thinking he was considerably over-stepping what is legal and/or ethical?

beefturnmail

Nationwide seem to have implemented a hard-selling strategy recently. Went in to pay a cheque the other day and the cashier started giving me a long spiel trying to sell me a credit card (which I didn't want or need). Wouldn't take no for an answer, and I had to reach in to recover my card and receipt and walk away.

Having said that, they've offered me a lot of flexsclusive (i.e. exclusive only to current account customers) products recently which have been very competitve.

maninthestreet

I mis-read the thread title - as 'Nationwide - selling ethnics?'

AFK_Matrix

Yea me too, I was going to say that Nationwide really needs to be reported for selling those ethnics lol

lovinituk

Its nothing new. I was trained to do this 15 years a go when I worked for a bank. Hated the hard sell so moved on to IT within the same bank.

lippy1923

You should get used to it. It's something all managers higher up are pressing their staff to look at doing. Obviously the sales rep was trying to sell you something else- cross selling is what keeps them in their jobs.
Anyway, its perfectly legal for them to do this. They call it a duty of care to the customer. In a way it is. The rep only asked if you wanted to compare quotes to try and make you better off.
The amount of customers too lazy to search and swap providers each year is still astonishing. If they can make you better off (some cases they can) then why not ask the question.
Just politley say no thank you in future and don't worry about it.

Dirk_Gently_2

Cross-selling I'm quite used to and that's par for the course.

What I found reprehensible was this guy looking at my monthly transactions in order to use the information to try and sell me something.

To me that's misuse of the access he had to that information and it stinks.

money_maker_2

Dirk_Gently wrote: »

Cross-selling I'm quite used to and that's par for the course.

What I found reprehensible was this guy looking at my monthly transactions in order to use the information to try and sell me something.

To me that's misuse of the access he had to that information and it stinks.

Thats banking sales techniques I'm afraid. You get it with many other providers. Its not like he was telling the world who you have your insurance with, it was a personal call with you.
He was most likely looking to see how much you roughly pay each month/year so he could get a soft quote going quickly for you in the background to give you an idea of what they might charge, in comparison.

I think your being a tad over-sensitive IMO. At the end of the day, he was just doing his job, to the expected standards of his manager.
You can always move providers (although you are likely to get this elsewhere at some point) or you can do quotes online yourself to avoid this.

meer53

You might have saved some money on your insurance. Would you be complaining then ? Standard sales practice nowadays really.

ses6jwg

worst case is you'd have been on the phone another 5 minutes

best case youd have saved a few quid.

opinions4u

Horrible banks.

How disgusting that they try to make customers better off in the middle of a recession.

Even ethnics!