Nationwide Fairer Share Payment 2024

WillPS

EnPointe said:

many longstanding Nationwide customers often with substantial  sums on deposit  and/or invested in various vehicles through  Nationwide  are ineligible becasue they  don;t have a  current nationwide mortgage  or  their current account is  with an different provider ... 

That's fine, but that doesn't mean they should expect to be rewarded with an incentive designed to reward current account customers only. If the conditions remain in line with what they were last year and they miss out again then they'll have only themselves to blame.

boingy

I wonder how many pages the (Un)Fairer Share thread will reach this year... 

mark1959

I've had a current account with NW [for decades], along with a few savings accounts. But i'm ineligible. 

Zanderman

mark1959 said:

I've had a current account with NW [for decades], along with a few savings accounts. But i'm ineligible. 

How do you know? They haven't announced eligibility criteria for this year yet.

If you're going by last year's conditions and you have both a current account and savings accounts then surely, with a bit of creative movement of money around, you could have matched last year's eligibility earlier this year, on the off-chance that those conditions might be repeated this year.

blue.peter

mark1959 said:

I've had a current account with NW [for decades], along with a few savings accounts. But i'm ineligible. 

The criteria set were pretty arbitrary. It's certainly arguable that they were inappropriate. Indeed, I qualified last year, but am very far from convinced that I should have done. I'm of the view that length of membership should have been taken into account. But that's the way it goes. If this year's qualification rules are he same as last year's, I'll get it again. But I won't moan if I don't.

steven141

I think that they will probably want to offer more this year as they want to keep members sweet after the Virgin Money purchase and not giving members a say. 

eskbanker

steven141 said:

I think that they will probably want to offer more this year as they want to keep members sweet after the Virgin Money purchase and not giving members a say. 

That's one way of looking at it - alternatively, their approach to the VM deal will be seen by many as contemptuous of the membership, so it may be more realistic to expect less generous payment or terms....

boingy

eskbanker said:

steven141 said:

I think that they will probably want to offer more this year as they want to keep members sweet after the Virgin Money purchase and not giving members a say. 

That's one way of looking at it - alternatively, their approach to the VM deal will be seen by many as contemptuous of the membership, so it may be more realistic to expect less generous payment or terms....

What happened to the challenge of the VM thing? It's gone very quiet.

blue.peter

boingy said:

What happened to the challenge of the VM thing? It's gone very quiet.

There's an interesting article about this here. A couple of quotes from it:

Here’s the practical problem, though: even if Nationwide’s directors were sticklers for democratic governance, it’s hard to see how they could make a vote happen under current rules. The main problem is the 1986 Building Societies Act, which doesn’t require a society to hold a vote if it is buying a business that looks roughly like its own.

Could Nationwide hold a vote on the deal regardless? That’s where another obstacle arises in the form of the Takeover Panel, which oversees bids for listed companies and sensibly looks to protect a target’s shareholders from time-wasters, chancers and all manner of uncertainties. If a bidder makes a firm offer, it’s meant to be on the hook.

So it sounds as if any challenge would, legally, be pretty shaky.

Either I'm missing something, or the proposed Coventry BS takeover of Co-Operative Bank doesn't seem to be generating similar noise from its members. I don't understand why that should be.

WillPS

blue.peter said:

Either I'm missing something, or the proposed Coventry BS takeover of Co-Operative Bank doesn't seem to be generating similar noise from its members. I don't understand why that should be.

I do.

Nationwide came under sustained pressure from carpetbaggers in the 90s and early 00s, some of which are bitter that their payday never came and a smaller subset of which are to this day determined to undermine the building society by whatever means available to them. So far as I can tell Coventry Building Society never had to face down a significant demutualisation challenge, and so does not carry the same "activist member" problem.

There's also some evidence of jingoism and certainly hatred of Richard Branson in the language used in relation to the campaign against the VM takeover; of course the Co-operative Bank is also owned by a motley collection of US hedge funds but perhaps the fact they are less visible gives less cause for angst amongst the xenophobic/high-profile-billionaire-phobic.