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

GetRichOrDieSaving

I currently have 4x issue 4 RS with Principality and this obviously equals £800 per month deposits totalling £4,800 total over the duration of all 6-month terms. By taking away the ability to renew a second, third or even fourth issue at maturity means that deposits will drop to just £200 a month and £1,200 in total for each issue I own. 

Principality make money off my money and
I can get a little cut of the pie for my saving efforts. Other than the issue of ‘rule breaking’ why would they not want my money? It’s just going to go to another bank or building society. Or are they expecting us to renew into a poor offering account, which none of us are going to do…. 

Am I being naive to think that Principality are going to miss out as just as much as us over this? 

cricidmuslibale

jameseonline 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.)

Just 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!

Given the current state of the market why would you expect a building society to put up rates?

I’m not in any way expecting PBS to put up their rates! I specifically mentioned that the currently available maturity fixed rate bonds are not paying particularly attractive interest rates at c. 3.75% AER which is clearly true at this moment in time when you can find a lot of non-maturity fixed rate savings accounts elsewhere paying between 4.20% and 4.50% AER, depending on the length of the fixed term.

I also pointed out that PBS’s current standard Regular Saver bond (Issue 36) is paying a mediocre fixed annual interest rate of 4.85% gross. I then explained why 4.85% is quite an unappealing interest rate for a standard regular saver at the moment; if PBS’s next standard Regular Saver retains the same fixed rate, it may be a more attractive interest rate by then.

Please could I gently and politely ask that my posts, which I generally put a lot of thought into, be read more carefully in future than the one referred to above seems to have been so that they are less likely to be misunderstood?

It’s all too easy to respond in a ‘clever’ and ‘witty’ manner but sometimes this type of response can also be rather unkind to the poster to whom you are replying!

Section62

jameseonline 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.

Cutting in half?, but half of 6 is 3, maths is so confusing 

If their accounts last twice as long then they will have half the number of maturities/renewals to process. (roughly)

alfred64

Regular Saver accounts are building societies loss leaders. And yes Principality know about Money saving expert forum. It was mentioned when I opened my accounts in branch. 
When the bank rate in U.S is reduced Wednesday it is highly likely U.K will follow suit next week (18th) so saver rates generally will be reduced further. Enjoy.

shirley999

I can't help but think that Principality are the smart ones here.  When they need the funds, they allow the duplicates to go through.  They can just cherry pick according to what funds they need.  As someone mentioned, it's possibly a slow period, lending-wise, coming up to Christmas, so we're seeing the majority of duplicate accounts being declined right now. If it suits 'us', we continue to opt into a duplicate account in the hope they need the funds.

Eco_Miser

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.

The customer has this issue already part involves at least one database query, possibly several, and needs to be done for each option, so possibly lots of extra lines of code in a simplistic ad hoc manner, or a re-think on how they generate and check the available options, for cleaner, neater code, but a longer development time. Depends on whether they have an in-house programmer, an external programming team, or are just buying in a platform system with their branding added.

For comparison,consider how long it takes for the forum team to get this forum tweaked when needed.

masonic

GetRichOrDieSaving said:

I currently have 4x issue 4 RS with Principality and this obviously equals £800 per month deposits totalling £4,800 total over the duration of all 6-month terms. By taking away the ability to renew a second, third or even fourth issue at maturity means that deposits will drop to just £200 a month and £1,200 in total for each issue I own. 

Principality make money off my money and
I can get a little cut of the pie for my saving efforts. Other than the issue of ‘rule breaking’ why would they not want my money? It’s just going to go to another bank or building society. Or are they expecting us to renew into a poor offering account, which none of us are going to do…. 

Am I being naive to think that Principality are going to miss out as just as much as us over this? 

These are probably loss-making accounts. Otherwise there'd be no reason to have a low limit or short term. They'd probably need to be lending at double digit rates to leave enough after bad debt and costs to sustain a 7.5% payout rate. That is sub-prime lending, which is very high risk and not something a lender would want much of on their balance sheet. Very easy to lose your shirt as those of us dabbling in P2P lending discovered.

Banks and BS do offer unprofitable products to cross-sell other products and it must work in general or they wouldn't do it. Another example of this is the current account with rewards or perks.

clairec666

Eco_Miser said:

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.

The customer has this issue already part involves at least one database query, possibly several, and needs to be done for each option, so possibly lots of extra lines of code in a simplistic ad hoc manner, or a re-think on how they generate and check the available options, for cleaner, neater code, but a longer development time. Depends on whether they have an in-house programmer, an external programming team, or are just buying in a platform system with their branding added.

For comparison,consider how long it takes for the forum team to get this forum tweaked when needed.

As I've dabbled in a bit of coding myself, it would be interesting to have a sneak peak at Principality's system, their underlying databases, etc. I would guess that their programming is not done in house; or if it was, tagging on extra features to existing code can create messy code or lead to unexpected problems, so they may want to avoid implementing it for now and will incorporate it next time they give their system a major overhaul. Just speculating here, I have no idea what goes on behind the scenes.

WillPS

I suspect like most building societies it's a hodgepodge of systems with an ancient ledger appliance at the core of it. Again, speculation, but this seems to be the norm. 

Principality's customer facing stuff appears to be bespoke, but of course that doesn't mean they made it themselves or even that it is "theirs".

pecunianonolet

30 pages to go until we reach the limit here. Wonder if we can fill another 30 pages with Principality chat? So much speculation about reasons and things we don't have a clue about. We basically serve potential fixes on a silver platter, all they need to do is read here. Their PR agency probably is reading here and creating reports, which is totally normal and I have ordered PR agencies to do similar things in the past, just a different industry. 

Just be happy about extra interest you could generate in the past and everyone always knew and clicked to acknowledge T&C's so if it's not happening anymore be happy about the opportunity in the first place, not matter the reasoning behind.