Maturing Charter Fixed term bond ISA

SloughSally

They sent me an email yesterday informing me of a maturing fixed term ISA bond.
They gave my maturity options of another 1 year fix at 4%, however on their current available accounts a 1 year fixed rate bond ISA is 4.1%

So current customers with maturing ISA bonds are being offered less to carry the bond on than people opening new bonds of the same time scale.
Not good.

x44

Yup - it's standard practice for them it seems.

They just hate their existing customers.

See my previous thread on the same a while back.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6633339/

Woodstok2000

Why stick with them at all when you can easily get 4.3% elsewhere?

Shylock_249

x44 said:

Yup - it's standard practice for them it seems.

They just hate their existing customers.

Yep, Standard Practice.  I complained to them a few years back and got a phone call from someone trying to baffle me with BS.

If you try to circumvent by opening a higher rate account before the account matures, let's say 14 days before, and transfer the maturing account into the new account, the second account you opened will have been active from when you opened it NOT when it was funded.  So in my example you would only be getting interest at the higher rate for 50 weeks of the year, NOT 52.

And, I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that when I went to open the higher rate I was asked if I was an existing customer and if so to login.  When I logged in the rate reverted to the offered rate on maturity NOT the new rate. 

Albermarle

Seems a bit of an odd strategy to make existing customers feel unwanted for the sake of 0.1%.
I remember other providers would occasionally offer maturing accounts a better rate, not worse. 

x44

Nah,

They figure that maybe 95% (I guess) will renew their bond without realising what is going on.

The next 4% will have figured it out but simply cannot be bothered to move their savings elsewhere.

That the leaves the hated 1% (us on here) whom the savings groups simple despise for operating a sort of Treasury Operations on their personal savings accounts by chopping/and changing for higher interest rates at the drop of a hat: just like their own corporate treasury operations team do!

So they know that a very small minority will cash out and move elsewhere - but they also know that this group of people are purely mercenary in their approach to savings and should Charter offer a decent market leading rate in the future they will be back in an instant with no grudges held.

In the meantime they will have managed to renew a whole swathe of maturing deposits at slightly reduced interest rate payable, and at a such large numbers with maybe £100m (wild guess!) in an account issue 0.1% does make a difference so overall it's a win for them.

I do often wonder though whether Savings groups Social Media Teams prowl over forums like this one and similar looking for adverse comment and feeding back to management.

Hattie627

Yes. I have had this experience before with Charter Savings Bank. It is not good. The difference in the rates is usually pretty marginal but it doesn't feel right.

Shylock_249

Well, they are at it again! For a Maturing Fixed Rate ISA their maturity instructions offer a further 1 year fixed rate of 4.00% at the same time offering 4.32% on Money Facts.

Shylock_249

And again. I've got a 1 year fixed rate bond of £126+k maturing in early October and just received the email offering me maturity instructions. They obviously offer options: send to nominated account, split payments or reinvest for a period of time.

The maturity rate for 1 year reinvestment is 4.56% but on their website they are offering 1 year bonds at 4.82%. Based on a 1 year bond rounded up to £127k (to keep it tidy) the difference for that year would be £330.20.

ToastLady

Yes same happened to me in August offered a much lower rate than offered on their website. I was so annoyed, transferred to Tandem at the same better rate. At least Tandem don't offer you worse rates than advertised when it comes to renewal, and sometimes you get offered a better rate.

Shylock_249

In defence of Charter, I phoned them the other day regarding the options given in their maturity instructions saying that I could open a new account with a higher interest rate outside the maturity options. The guy told me I could open a new account with the higher rate and after about 10 minutes the new account would appear within the maturity options. That's what I did.

I remember that a couple of years ago I'd opened a new 1 year fixed rate account within Charter to transfer money on maturity and the date of opening the account was the date I'd opened it and NOT the day it was funded by the proceeds of the maturing account, so I was NOT actually getting 52 weeks interest but 52 minus the time between opening and funding.…… This time when I'd requested maturity into the (higher rate) new account the date of maturity was shown as 1 year from opening the account. I phoned Charter again and the guy said, quite correctly, that given a day or so the date would change on the web to when it was funded. I'm happy with that.