Beware The Nationwide Saver

Jimmymacslad

In May 2021 my daughter opened a Nationwide Building Society 1 Year Triple Access Online Saver with a (supposed) variable rate of 0.40%.Some months later a new issue was launched by Nationwide paying 0.45% and my daughter queried why her variable issue was still at 0.40%. After receiving illogical replies she officially complained to them and after taking an inordinate length of time to reply (including two stalling letters) they said there was nothing they could do. Later issues of this product have afforded 0.70% and 0.80% currently. SOME VARIABLE RATE !
I did consider Nationwide different to the big banks - no longer !

grumiofoundation

Surely she can withdraw from the 0.4% account and deposit in the higher interest accounts ? 

Although higher interest is available elsewhere - 1.5% with chase bank for example. Or for smaller amounts current accounts can offer a higher rate - e.g. virgin money 2% on £1000. 

Jimmymacslad

I take your view - but is that really the point here. She is savvy, many other savers are not !

Albermarle

Jimmymacslad said:

I take your view - but is that really the point here. She is savvy, many other savers are not !

I agree with you . If it is a variable rate account , then it should just go up and not always to be a new issue. If it went down I suspect then your daughters account would suddenly become variable  !

I did consider Nationwide different to the big banks - no longer !

Many of us woke up to this fact some time ago . I used to have around the £85K limit with them , even a bit more at times . Now I just have the ( good) current account and a small linked easy access account , that is shrinking anyway .

rallycurve

It looks like that's not the case for their equivalent ISA (1 Year Triple Access Online ISA). I just checked mine and they have upped the interest from 0.70% to 0.80%. Maybe because it's a newer issue?

General_Grant

I opened an issue 12 of the Triple Access account but did open an issue 13 - 
Nationwide did email about the new issue and included mentioning that one could open the latest issue to get the better rate.

Issue 12 has indeed stayed at 0.45% whereas issue 13 moved from 0.7% to 0.8% automatically (that's the straightforward Triple Access not the ISA version).

Perhaps it seemed too short a gap to create a new issue number.  Or they may have received a number of complaints last time and an outflow of money from issue 12.

I've still got £1 in the Issue 12 - because when I tried to close it, it was outside the time of day when they will do this.  Will do so next week.