Santander 'Free Forever' Business Account changes to Terms & Conditions

AET9

If you have one of these supposedly 'Free Forever' Santander Business Bank Accounts you need to act now or you will lose it.
They are sending out new Terms & Condition with Statements in the form of a 3 page inclusion entitled "IMPORTANT CHANGES TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR SANTANDER BUSINESS CURRENT ACCOUNTS AND BUSINESS SAVINGS ACCOUNTS" taking effect from 1 May 2014.
This is the important paragraph:

6 A new condition 17.4 will be inserted to 'Changes to your account' (previously Condition 16) as follows:
17.4 We may convert your account to another account in our range if we have valid reason (for example, if you are no longer eligible for the account or if we decide to no longer offer that particular account).

At the end of the third page there is this closing paragraph:

If you are happy with the changes you do not need to do anything and unless we hear from you we will assume you accept the changes. If you decide not to accept the changes, please call us on the relevant phone number below. If you do not accept the changes, this will mean closing your account and there will be no charge for closing your account. Full copies of our updated Terms and Conditions will be available from 1 May 2014 on our website and from our branches.

This is a sneaky way of trying to get rid of the 230,000 free business banking account holders as I'm sure many will not read through these new T&C's.

magpiecottage has recently posted a template letter towards the end of page 1 on a previous thread entitled MSE News: Santander U-turn saves free business banking. I used this template, posted off my letter and emailed it directly to the CEO.

This afternoon I received an email response from Anthony Bennett,Business Banking Media & Executive Complaints.
The gist of this reply is that he will be carrying out an independent review in the next 48 hours and when this is complete he will provide me with the investigation details and proposed outcome. After this if I remain unhappy
and do not feel my complaint has been satisfactorily resolved I am entitled to refer my complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service. This will cost Santander £500 per referral. In theory 230,000 x 500 = £11,500,000 !!!! quite a bit more than the minimum £7.50 charge per account they would collect and are attempting to force us to pay.



So if you want to keep your 'Free Forever' Business account you must take action.

Gizmo247

Santander changed their Zero Current Account T&Cs to exactly this a while back (JULY 2013?). It may just be a standard backstop for Santander or they may be preparing the field for pay-only accounts in the future.

AET9

Not sure what to make of this but I got a phone call Mr Bennett saying that this clause is in the current T&C's and this amendment is just to condense it a bit. He said that having spoken to the relevant departments, at present there is no intention to make changes to the free business banking accounts but he would not put this in writing so to me that speaks volumes. There will come a time in the not too distant future where Santander will make an attempt to get rid of the free accounts, we will just have to be on our guard.

Karamac

Wrote to and emailed the Santander UK CEO about this last week, after seeing magpiecottage's post. Had a telephone call within an hour of sending the email, saying the matter was being investigated. Got a letter in the post yesterday, stating

"...our terms and conditions have always outlined we can make changes to the terms and conditions of customers account [sic] for any number of valid reasons."

I've a feeling Santander consider the very existence of their free business accounts is valid reason for making these changes, so would warn all 'free banking forever' customers to keep a very close eye on all mail coming through from Santander.

magpiecottage

Great that people are writing in and "warning" them.

Remember, the point is that they advertised the "Free Forever" deal. We are therefore asserting that this formed what is known as a collateral contract because we "relied" on that promise in making our decision to bank with what was then Abbey National PLC. (The Companies House records show that it changed is name to Santander UK PLC - but it is one and the same).

What we really want is to "remind" them. We cannot currently complain as they have not done anything to complain about.

If, on the other hand, the send a letter saying you have six months to go to FOS then I think you need to write to FOS and say you pointed out the collateral contract and they said you had six months to refer it to FOS. You therefore want to refer it to FOS as a precaution to ensure Santander does not attempt to "timebar" a complaint later but at present they have done nothing that would cause you a loss so you are content to hold the matter in abeyance provided they never do so - but could they acknowledge receipt please.

That way you keep your options open.

I suppose they could buy us out of the contract.