Nationwide Building Society Loyalty!

xylophone

how angry people are getting about it.

People might be less angry if Nationwide hadn't been spending vast amounts on advertising being "on their side"........?

ColdIron

I'm getting a little cheesed off with all the emails I am receiving from all banks and other services saying "We're here to help" that then go on to tell me which parts of their service they can no longer help me with

Albermarle

Sailtheworld said:

Hopefully nobody was hurt in the stampede to secure an extra 0.3% interest as they, without any sense of irony, complain about Nationwide's lack of loyalty and issuance of free money.

This site has been around for ages - surely everyone knows it generally costs money to be loyal to a brand. It's vaguely amusing that this has come as a surprise to anyone and downright hilarious how angry people are getting about it.

Of course normally you are right about loyalty to financial companies , but this is a special case. N/Wide stayed as a mutual , when other large BS turned into rapacious banks that knackered the economy . For many years they offered competitive rates that did not go up and down unpredictably and did not pull stunts like offering new customers better rates , and they largely avoided the various misselling scandals. In the last couple of years their attitude seemed to change and then I guess this unexpectedly and badly handled large cut in rates has been the last straw for many 'loyal' customers.
By the way their two year fixed rate ISA is 0.6% compared to 1.45% available . 0.85% on £40K is £340 .

bowlhead99

2010 said

I wouldn`t hold your breathe on thew new rates anyway.
They can`t look after loyalty customers, but are trying to attract new ones.

For years on this forum you've been banging on about how Nationwide are terrible and have offered bad rates for years. It seems whenever I look in at an NW thread (as I have some products with them), I see your name telling everyone to leave them and how you have just moved all your money away from them - and I wondered just how it is that if you always keep moving all your money away from them because they are terrible and disloyal to their customers, that you can still always be needing to move all your money away from them.

A quick thread search for "loyalty" with you as the poster reminds me:

In October 2012 you were all, "For a mutual who continuously bangs the drum about no shareholders to pay out to, and how it rewards loyalty, it must have the crappiest savings rates in the UK", and the following month "Crap rate for 15 years loyalty and a crap building society with overpaid directors".

In September 2014 you mentioned that you hadn't had any serious money with them for a decade, just a token fiver to keep the relationship, but had moved money into a loyalty account over the summer just before they dropped the rate again to 1.5, which annoyed you... "LOYALTY?" you screamed.  But two months later you were telling the Virgin thread that you'd just moved your money out of Virgin to top up your NW loyalty account (as presumably NW's offer was decently better than their competition).

By March 2015 the rate changed again so you were telling us that "This is really crap news for a so-called "loyalty rate" and that`s for fifteen years loyalty.The directors are greedy ba*stards" ;  although we know you hadn't shown them fifteen years loyalty  - because six months earlier you had proudly told us that for a decade you'd only kept a token fiver in the account just to grab a good deal if one came. 

Over various Nationwide threads over the following month you told people to "vote with your feet" and "The best complaint and the easiest is to move your money elsewhere", and that your money was going to Virgin where no loyalty was needed (good job no loyalty was needed, because you had dumped Virgin in a heartbeat to go to Nationwide a few months earlier, despite your evident hatred of them and that they had screwed you on the rate mere weeks earlier).

By the end of 2015 you were still telling people that NW were poor and "has a track record of wheeling savers in and then cutting the rate. Loyalty saver as one example.", though you still opened their flex regular saver account (because it was the best rate in the country).

A year later at the end of 2016 you were talking about putting your matured funds into the Loyalty accounts and opening a new regular saver, so hey, they can't be all that bad.

In summer 2018, there was a thread about how BoE base rate was ticking up by 0.25% but Nationwide were mostly only increasing rates by 0.1% and not applying the full proportional upwards movement (they already paid more than the base rate, of course). You were banging the drum that there was no loyalty for anything these days and people should "move move move".

Then a couple of weeks ago on this thread you were telling us that "When I found out about the NW cut from 1.4% to .25% I opened a new 2yr fixed ISA with Shawbrook at 1.45% and transferred the lot".

To me it seems like pretty much every year or so, you move all of your money as far away from Nationwide as fast as you can. It's baffling how you so consistently need to take all your money away from their terrible rates and terrible service and terrible loyalty and terrible greedy directors and stupid and miserly policies. If I think a service provider is bad or unreliable compared to their competition, I won't be moving all my business away from them every year! Just the once will do.

2010

You obviously have time on your hands.
I try to get the best rate and hence, move my money.
Of course if it`s a fixed rate, I can only move it when it matures.
In the case of the "loyalty" ISA,you are allowed one withdrawal, so I withdrew.
I did expect NW to cut rates after the BoE did but not as savagely and certainly not by more than the .65%. (1.15% reduction)
Incidently, I also move my insurance, broadband, mobile, energy,etc,etc, as and when.

alypen

By way of comparison, I've just had an email from The Coventry, which effectively says "The BoE has reduced the base rate by 0.65 percentage points, so regrettably we are having to follow suit."  NOT by e.g. 1.75 points, but by 0.65.  A bit different!

Tildaplum

excellent bit of research bowlhead99 and serves as a reminder to us all that when all said and done we are lucky beyond most people's wildest dreams to be living in a first world country in a time of unprecidented peace.

talexuser

I was going to dump my Flexdirect when it went to 1% but found out I would no longer have the cashback on the credit card without the current account so keep it running. I've had £100 in an Invest Direct since the carpet bagging days in the mid 90s and have not closed it because don't need the money and some laziness in not wanting to chuck the membership advantage (pre charity conditions) even though the chances of anything now are practically zero. Today they sent me a letter, the interest rate is going from 0.1% to 0.01%. I couldn't help but laugh out load, wow... if I had a £1000 in there what would I buy each year with my windfall of  10 pence.

kuratowski

talexuser said:
Today they sent me a letter, the interest rate is going from 0.1% to 0.01%. I couldn't help but laugh out load, wow... if I had a £1000 in there what would I buy each year with my windfall of  10 pence.

Best to leave it in the account to earn compound interest.  In a mere 7000 years you'll have doubled your money 

zagfles

kuratowski said:

talexuser said:
Today they sent me a letter, the interest rate is going from 0.1% to 0.01%. I couldn't help but laugh out load, wow... if I had a £1000 in there what would I buy each year with my windfall of  10 pence.

Best to leave it in the account to earn compound interest.  In a mere 7000 years you'll have doubled your money 

I make it 6932 years. log 2/log 1.0001

But that's wrong anyway as you won't get any compounding for the first 500 years as the interest on the interest will be less than half a penny, so zero rounded to nearest penny.

Yes I'm bored.