Gone from paid internship to student - getting rejected for Current Accounts

mcintyre1994

I've just come from two internships where I earned fairly good money, and have saved a few thousand in an instant access cash ISA (Skipton 1.6% as recommended here).

I came across Martin's article on awesome interest current accounts, and figured I'd give them a go.

So, I signed up for Nationwide Flex first, this was when I was still working - they asked my annual income, I gave them what I was earning then, accepted.

I've just tried signing for the TSB plus account, but am now a student. They explicitly said not to give student loan as income, so I had to say £0 income and >£0 expenses (they asked rent + living expenses, covered by student loan but they ignore that). So they rejected me.

I figure that multiple rejected current accounts won't look good on a credit history, so is there any route around this without lying and using my income last year which seems like a bad idea? I am just doing this to maximise interest so while I don't think they'll be super keen to help me out, I don't see why I'm a risk - it'll be a stable balance and money transferred in and back out if needed to keep them happy.

The other account I'm considering is a Tesco bank one, but the TSB is the other 5% so it'd be really nice to max that first - and I'm not sure if Tesco will reject me on a similar basis anyway.

Anybody else experienced this or have any ideas around, or am I probably out of luck until I can tell them an honest non-student loan income again?

eskbanker

mcintyre1994 wrote: »

I am just doing this to maximise interest so while I don't think they'll be super keen to help me out, I don't see why I'm a risk - it'll be a stable balance and money transferred in and back out if needed to keep them happy.

You should bear in mind that these are current accounts, so, even if you're looking to use them as savings accounts, they're not viewed that way by the banks offering them, who are quite entitled to reject applicants who don't satisfy their internal scoring criteria for whatever reason, i.e. being able to meet the published Ts & Cs in terms of minimum monthly funding, etc, isn't always going to be enough.

dggar

My daughter is a student and she applied for a TSB Plus current account on line and was rejected.


She went to a local TSB branch and applied in person and was accepted and given an account number and sort code immediately. They were aware that her "income" was a student loan and they even sorted out the R85 formalities before she left the branch.


If you can get to a branch it might be worth trying that method.

djpailo

I agree with the above poster, best to try opening it up in a branch and see what they say.