Santander or First Direct ?

stylus360

Hi All

Looking to get an offset mortgage soon and been reading some bad reviews about Santander, messing up DBs, terrible when you ring them etc.

ANyone got either ?

Cheers

Lavendyr

We're with First Direct, have been for a year now. Everything has been really straightforward, they've got everything right, and they are great when you ring them - you get through to a real person straight away. You do need to have a current account with them to get access to their mortgages though.

Can't speak to Santander from personal experience, but our sellers were with them and didn't have many good things to say about them!

firesidemaid

Another vote for First Direct here.

Penny1108

I have a joint FD mortgage with my partner for our family home and a separate Santander mortgage for my previous flat which I now let (with consent to let from Santander I hasten to say).

Interest rates and T&Cs aside I would choose FD all the way. Easy to get hold of, easy to deal with, good communication on the levels of the mortgage. santander on the other hand, kind of feels like they still operate in the 80's - asking me to send a fax for example. I think they have managed to mess up every single overpayment so far despite phone calls before and after the payment. Distinctly less courteous on the phone as well.

jamesd

I have both and a FD mortgage.

FD have their good points but overall I'd now prefer Santander to them because of the troubles at FD compared to Santander.

FD:

1. Took five tries to get me a correct mortgage contract, taking several months to do it. The earlier tries got interest rate or amount or term wrong. They use the HSBC mortgage team. Near the end of this I ended up getting a call from the vendor asking if I was actually planning to complete the purchase. It did eventually happen, but that shows they were considering pulling out.

2. Seems not to like lots of similar transactions, to the point of telling me they were going to close my current account and mortgage offset account in 30 days. After a complaint they listened to the call where the previous week I'd told them that I'd be happy to do the transactions from another account if they liked, just let me know and they had said it was fine to carry out a specified number of transactions, that I hadn't yet got even close to. But they still said don't do a range of other transactions and blocked any new credit. Perhaps here they are being let down by their security team, which they might share with HSBC. It didn't help that the mortgage contract term they were relying on to do this wasn't consistent with the FCA guidance on what it considered to be unfair contract terms (you're supposed to say what can't be done, not arbitrarily say "I'm not comfortable with that" about lawful transactions not breaching the current account T&C and make a major change to the mortgage as a result).

3. The new FD security token system offers poor security and convenience compared to the text message one at Santander. Something else that FD share with HSBC, though at least they aren't making it mandatory for all logins, the least secure way of using this particular system.

If you notice the pattern, it's FD seeming to have trouble when the HSBC part seems to get involved.

FD is great in many ways but they seem to be able to screw up quite thoroughly when they get it wrong. I no longer trust them to actually allow their current accounts to be used for investment-related transactions. They seem for some reason not to like investment-related transactions of a wide range of types even though they sell mortgages with those as the repayment strategy.

FD would perhaps do better if they talked with their security people and got their story about what they do and don't want straight and consistent and told customers from the start. Like before selling them the mortgage.

Santander do more of the smaller screwing up but seem in my experience so far not to fail quite so spectacularly badly when they do get it wrong. But maybe that's because I haven't had a mortgage with them yet... Like FD, security seems to be one of their weak spots, but in their case with an apparently over-sensitive automatic system. Once it got used to the transactions it has been fine.

Handelsbanken seem good but apparently they use HSBC for their transactions, so given my FD experience I probably wouldn't want to try them either.

If I just wanted trouble-free current account service I'd pick NatWest over either of them. Though maybe if FD did more of its own work and had HSBC doing less that might change. For a mortgage I might go with Yorkshire Building Society.

stylus360

I'm looking for an Offset mortgage, wish i could stay with Nationwide as they are superb BUT do not allow me to borrow back any overpayments made.

jamesd

Offset mortgages are safer than the overpay and borrow back type anyway. Borrowing back is at the discretion of the lender, withdrawing money from an offset account isn't.

The reason I mentioned YBS is that they have a range of offset mortgages that is sometimes competitive and I looked at them as well as FD. But I don't know how competitive they are today, might not be at the moment.

stylus360

Decisions, decisions, i just want someone reliable as a top priority.

stylus360

I have paid off my mortgage and have £150k equity in my property, looking to borrow around £40/50k.

DO NOT want any fee's for overpaying as some seem to be fixed for the first couple of years preventing overpaying ?

jamesd

With an offset mortgage overpaying doesn't really matter. There's no limit on how much you can put into the offset account and that has the same effect as overpaying unless you wanted to close the mortgage completely.

YBS appeared in one of the top 3 lists in a recent Sunday paper but with a repayment penalty for a few years. Offset so that penalty probably won't matter much.