The Old Regular Savers Discussion Thread 28/12/24-29/1/26

trickydicky14

Pickledonionlover said:

Pickledonionlover said:

Principality RS Maturity failures 

Having ten currently running I submitted three Maturity Instructions over the weekend to mature into further RS.

All three have been refused by message and that's my first time for refusals.

I'll be interested to see if those type of accounts I've been refused for are part of the postal offering when they drop through my letter box.

So I've now received the postal maturity options for these three accounts I've been refused.

And guess what they include the type of account I've been refused for.

If you're reading this Principality staff - save yourself grief and paper by not giving us the literature or online options for accounts we're not able to have from now 👍 

If the form clearly states you are only allowed one account of each type why should they change anything. It's just a generic form with the added text 'one of each type'.

cricidmuslibale

trickydicky14 said:

cricidmuslibale said:

Assuming Principality are going to remain very strict in preventing any of their savers from having more than one Regular Saver of the same issue from now onwards, it would be very helpful if the ‘entirely legitimate’ maturity options that the saver is allowed to choose from were more attractive in terms of their interest rates, please!

At present, the currently available maturity fixed rate bonds are paying only c. 3.70% gross AER and the current standard Regular Saver (Issue 36) is paying a mediocre 4.85% fixed gross annual interest. This latter interest rate, although not nearly as dire as the current 4.15% & 4.25% annual interest rates payed by the standard regular savers of Coventry BS and Yorkshire BS respectively, is still rather unappealing right now when the standard regular savers of all the big banks and a good number of building societies pay annual interest rates of 5% or more. (Although quite a lot of the rates above 5% are variable to be fair.)

At the moment Principality seems to be applying a lot of stick and not giving a lot of carrot(s)! Their visiting Christmas reindeer are not going to be well fed this year, it appears!

Do me a favour, PBS have fed us so many carrots over the past few years you should be able to see in the dark. Just take on board the party is over and move on. It was great whilst it lasted thanks PBS.

There is no need whatsoever to be so aggressive and unfriendly when making your point(s)! The key phrase is ‘at the moment’ which, with respect, you appear not to have taken on board at all and during the last paragraph of my post I was clearly just having a bit of very gentle fun!  More importantly, you do not appear to have taken into account the more serious and entirely reasonable points I was making in the previous two paragraphs before deciding to sound off at me in a way that comes across as very derisory and more than a little rude!

spreadsheeterapple

shirley999 said:

Principality

They would make it more manageable for themselves if they cut renewals in half by having 12-month terms instead of 6 months.  Might also halve the number of posts on here.

Well 6-monthers do have legitimate uses for 'normal' life, e.g. one coming out in summer for holidays, and one near xmas shopping week, or one you can start in Feb when you've recovered from xmas spending which then matures just the right time for school uniform shopping. 
I have to admit to putting them up to the idea when answering a past survey, sorry about that !

Pickledonionlover

trickydicky14 said:

Pickledonionlover said:

Pickledonionlover said:

Principality RS Maturity failures 

Having ten currently running I submitted three Maturity Instructions over the weekend to mature into further RS.

All three have been refused by message and that's my first time for refusals.

I'll be interested to see if those type of accounts I've been refused for are part of the postal offering when they drop through my letter box.

So I've now received the postal maturity options for these three accounts I've been refused.

And guess what they include the type of account I've been refused for.

If you're reading this Principality staff - save yourself grief and paper by not giving us the literature or online options for accounts we're not able to have from now 👍 

If the form clearly states you are only allowed one account of each type why should they change anything. It's just a generic form with the added text 'one of each type'.

They've included separate leaflets with all the T&C's of the accounts that we are ineligible to open.

Anyway I'm out of here.

clairec666

spreadsheeterapple said:

shirley999 said:

Principality

They would make it more manageable for themselves if they cut renewals in half by having 12-month terms instead of 6 months.  Might also halve the number of posts on here.

Well 6-monthers do have legitimate uses for 'normal' life, e.g. one coming out in summer for holidays, and one near xmas shopping week, or one you can start in Feb when you've recovered from xmas spending which then matures just the right time for school uniform shopping. 
I have to admit to putting them up to the idea when answering a past survey, sorry about that !

And to be fair to them, they do offer a 12-month regular saver, i.e. the Christmas one, at a decent rate, although it's not available all year round. Still, better than a lot of other providers.

If, as it seems, Principality are getting strict on multiple regular savers, then they're well within their rights to do so - we've had a lot of luck with their loopholes and it was fun while it lasted. Presumably they have been aware of this for a while, and have weighed up the costs of adding a few extra lines of code to their system (IF customer has this issue already, disable this options, ELSE allow this option, etc.) but I'm surprised they're tackling the problem with manual intervention on each account, surely paying the staff that are handling this will cost them more in the long run.

flaneurs_lobster

clairec666 said:

If, as it seems, Principality are getting strict on multiple regular savers, then they're well within their rights to do so - we've had a lot of luck with their loopholes and it was fun while it lasted. Presumably they have been aware of this for a while, and have weighed up the costs of adding a few extra lines of code to their system (IF customer has this issue already, disable this options, ELSE allow this option, etc.) but I'm surprised they're tackling the problem with manual intervention on each account, surely paying the staff that are handling this will cost them more in the long run.

It might be right to get a little perspective here, each one of those 6mth RS accounts gives a return of £26, no-one is funding their second yacht from this deal.

Bridlington1

clairec666 said:

spreadsheeterapple said:

shirley999 said:

Principality

They would make it more manageable for themselves if they cut renewals in half by having 12-month terms instead of 6 months.  Might also halve the number of posts on here.

Well 6-monthers do have legitimate uses for 'normal' life, e.g. one coming out in summer for holidays, and one near xmas shopping week, or one you can start in Feb when you've recovered from xmas spending which then matures just the right time for school uniform shopping. 
I have to admit to putting them up to the idea when answering a past survey, sorry about that !

And to be fair to them, they do offer a 12-month regular saver, i.e. the Christmas one, at a decent rate, although it's not available all year round. Still, better than a lot of other providers.

If, as it seems, Principality are getting strict on multiple regular savers, then they're well within their rights to do so - we've had a lot of luck with their loopholes and it was fun while it lasted. Presumably they have been aware of this for a while, and have weighed up the costs of adding a few extra lines of code to their system (IF customer has this issue already, disable this options, ELSE allow this option, etc.) but I'm surprised they're tackling the problem with manual intervention on each account, surely paying the staff that are handling this will cost them more in the long run.

It would depend, whilst I don't know the ins and outs of their systems I would assume there would be a noteworthy cost associated with removing the option to convert the account into a new RS specifically for maturing accounts where the user already holds the RS already or possibly isn't possible with their current systems so might require a more widespread IT upgrade.

The other factor at play is how much other workload have the staff got on? If staff have, say, an hour of spare time each dotted across the working day without any work to do, getting these staff to spend that hour manually checking maturity instructions isn't going to cost Principality BS anything as the staff would be sat doing nothing in that time so the end result is the staff are busier but less people are getting hold of duplicate accounts without any extra cost to the building society.

Moreover if there is a big push to manually intervene and close duplicate accounts now you'll inevitably get fewer instances of people having duplicate accounts to check given you're going to be trimming the collections of those who already have duplicate accounts and people are less likely to bother to select the option to roll over into a new RS if they've been refused in the past.

I'm only speculating but doing such the IT upgrade necessary to disable the option to roll over into a new RS where the user already holds that RS might have a sizable cost associated with it, or at least one that is greater than the cost of manually intervening.

clairec666

Bridlington1 said:
The other factor at play is how much other workload have the staff got on? If staff have, say, an hour of spare time each dotted across the working day without any work to do, getting these staff to spend that hour manually checking maturity instructions isn't going to cost Principality BS anything as the staff would be sat doing nothing in that time so the end result is the staff are busier but less people are getting hold of duplicate accounts without any extra cost to the building society.

Fair point - maybe it's one of those "have a look at this while you're not busy" jobs.

Bridlington1 said:

I'm only speculating but doing such the IT upgrade necessary to disable the option to roll over into a new RS where the user already holds that RS might have a sizable cost associated with it, or at least one that is greater than the cost of manually intervening.

I know a fair bit about coding, but nothing about how banks commission their IT systems. If it's not done in-house, then any minor issues (and letting a small proportion of customers gain some extra accounts is probably considered minor) are not going to get looked at.

flaneurs_lobster said:

It might be right to get a little perspective here, each one of those 6mth RS accounts gives a return of £26, no-one is funding their second yacht from this deal.

I quite agree - hence why Principality have mostly left us alone until now.

OwnedByACat

Sorry if this has been noted before, but I just got a survey from Chase that quizzed me extensively about what I want from regular savers. Seems like they'll be bringing out a product

s71hj

clairec666 said:

Bridlington1 said:
The other factor at play is how much other workload have the staff got on? If staff have, say, an hour of spare time each dotted across the working day without any work to do, getting these staff to spend that hour manually checking maturity instructions isn't going to cost Principality BS anything as the staff would be sat doing nothing in that time so the end result is the staff are busier but less people are getting hold of duplicate accounts without any extra cost to the building society.

Fair point - maybe it's one of those "have a look at this while you're not busy" jobs.

Bridlington1 said:

I'm only speculating but doing such the IT upgrade necessary to disable the option to roll over into a new RS where the user already holds that RS might have a sizable cost associated with it, or at least one that is greater than the cost of manually intervening.

I know a fair bit about coding, but nothing about how banks commission their IT systems. If it's not done in-house, then any minor issues (and letting a small proportion of customers gain some extra accounts is probably considered minor) are not going to get looked at.

flaneurs_lobster said:

It might be right to get a little perspective here, each one of those 6mth RS accounts gives a return of £26, no-one is funding their second yacht from this deal.

I quite agree - hence why Principality have mostly left us alone until now.

In my old job we had "do this type of thing during quiet period" lists of tasks. I created the lists for the team! .