Downgrading Santander 123 to 123 Lite

akh43

I downgraded online to the 123 lite on 8th April, happened pretty much straight away, no monthly fee taken on the 10th April which is my anniversary date.  I did get a letter a few days later saying they were sorry to see me go, as if I had closed my account and then the following week a welcome letter as if I had just opened a new account, but just ignored both as everything was fine when I checked online.

st999

Hammer_Time said:

If you have a joint 123 account can just one of you login and downgrade to the lite account or do both need to do it?

I have a joint account and I did myself.

merchant_ac

It appears that the interest rate is to be further reduced, to 0.60%, from 3rd August.

Monthly interest of 0.60% (variable) on balances up to £20,000. Before 3 August 2020 you’ll receive 1.00%(variable) interest on the entire balance up to a maximum of £20,000

Steve_L

akh43 said:

I downgraded online to the 123 lite on 8th April, happened pretty much straight away, no monthly fee taken on the 10th April which is my anniversary date.  I did get a letter a few days later saying they were sorry to see me go, as if I had closed my account and then the following week a welcome letter as if I had just opened a new account, but just ignored both as everything was fine when I checked online.

And you expected someone who works in IT for a bank, and who probably came from RBS with glowing references, to have spotted this?

soulsaver

Hammer_Time said:

If you have a joint 123 account can just one of you login and downgrade to the lite account or do both need to do it?

Apparently your next door neighbour can.. if he knew your sort code and ac number.

badger09

Or indeed, anyone to whom you have ever sent a cheque - remember those? Or anyone who has paid money into your Santander account and has you as a saved payee ... etc

colsten

To be fair, any prankster would also need to know your DOB 

(That's me assuming that they will verify this against the DOB on your account - which might, of course, be an over-ambitious assumption)

digalumps

Has anyone found out for sure if the email address entered has to match the one on file?

pafpcg

colsten said:

To be fair, any prankster would also need to know your DOB 

(That's me assuming that they will verify this against the DOB on your account - which might, of course, be an over-ambitious assumption)

This is where I've hit an impass with my "upgrade"!  For nearly a week, my partner & I have been trying to follow the procedure to make the change our joint account to 123Lite - we've tried every combination of user identity (including our business account identities), different browsers and computers, but it always fails at a late stage with an error message (a generic message including the equivalent of "have you tried turning it off and starting again?").  Yesterday, I had a telephone call of over an hour with Santander's fraud department, someone who talked me step-by-step through the procedure (yes, it failed at the same spot) and finally talked to someone in the "Exceptions Team" who undertook to do the change for me but hit a snag which transpired to be that the Santander data-base has a different date-of-birth for me!*  So, yes, at some stage the process does check the customer's DoB.

A manager at Santander's Exceptions Team is now trying to get a change of my DoB authorised, but can't give a date, maybe next week.  I got the impression that many of the Santander support staff are working remotely.

*  This reminds me of the Nationwide which somehow managed to create a banking system which relied on two seperate customer data-bases, which demonstrated the proof of that fundamental rule of data-base management: hold key identity data in only one location within the system - the two data-bases had differing spellings of my surname!  My surname was always misspelt on the cheques.

snelmark

(I confess to not having read the entire thread...) however I have a Santander 123 (Select) & tried to downgrade to 123 Lite online earlier this week.
I got an email saying it can’t be done online & to call them.
I did so, but apparently I would have to change sort code & account number to do this... I have left it for now as if I am forced to do that, I might just switch banks, but does this sound right? Seems ridiculous....