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Santander ID and income check
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Another anecdote; last week I applied and was accepted for a Santander CC but wasn't asked anything you aren't normally asked on a credit application or to upload ID.
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I wouldn't want to put anyone off applying for anything based on my experience. At no point was there any suggestion of my account being blocked. It was just a step of the application process. It seems if @wmb194 did not have to complete this step, I must have been selected for some reason. It just took a minute or two.
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The other possibility is that if this avenue were not closed-off to low-level criminals would it not be better to capture and monitor this data with the possibility that it could be used in intelligence analysis. Sometimes it might be better to monitor those committing crime with a view to having a greater impact further down the line.
As it stands, my experience as a customer of the ID checking process is that it is failing badly, and banks are clearly spending significant amounts on not falling foul of regulations - the only people largely unaffected appear to be the criminals the process is intended to disrupt.
I'm unpersuaded this legislation is productive but I of the view that there are very few politicians brave enough to say so.
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I just got this with Santander, been a customer since I was aged around 12, back in the Abbey National days obviously. So approaching four decades.
Pretty mundane pre-populated stuff generally, and it said I didn't need to provide any ID at all. Perhaps as my mortgage is with them.
However, other income is pretty much impossible to answer. I get income from many sources, very sporadic, unpredictable and includes transfers from other banking groups. Because the Edge Saver is easy access I was using that as a float, and regularly moving funds in and out of it via the Edge Current account.
It wasn't all that clear to me whether, for example, having funds in FD and transferring to Santander would count as income. As it's not income to me, but it is income to my accounts within Santander. I suspect Santander's systems would see it as income, which is likely why I recently got a personal invite to their HNW account!
To make it even trickier to answer for me, I have been winding down stoozing over the past few months, so upcoming inflow will be much less in the next 12 months than the previous. One would hope that 40 years of ongoing custom would carry a modest bit of weight.
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Income = includes salary, pension, interest, dividends, PIDs, surveys. You might include other things like capital gains if they're regular and you think they round-out the picture.
Transfers between accounts isn't income but some banks will pick up on it and use them to qualify you for 'Select', 'Premier' or whatever. Anyone looking at these transfers will see they're from accounts in your name and not from e.g., a company.0 -
It's not a human though! Unless I exported all of my statements and conducted a detailed analysis, next to impossible to know what my average income into Santander was, and certainly impossible to know what it will be in the future. An example is that, one might say I gamble professionally, but those opportunities are erratic and my winnings are erratic. But I had a nice win this year, in the £k's, and I'd just withdrawn that into Santander recently (via PayPal). Gambling was one of the examples they listed as income.
Part of my thinking was that I am now on benefits, and for budgeting convenience and a linked savings account, I have my benefits paid into another banking group, and transfer them into Santander. So I didn't want to understate my 'income', or what one might term, effective income. Otherwise it would show I had minimal income and comparatively massive inflows and outflows over the last 12 months. Added to my personal finance flux, I only just applied for UC on Monday, so haven't even had any of that income yet and whilst I have an expectation of what it will be, I won't find out for definite until the end of my first AP.
In the end I opted to declare what I expect my personal income to be, plus approximate yield and cashback. I have nothing to hide, and only just applied for the mortgage charter to be implemented, so they already had an employment status update.
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Ultimately a human would look at it if there are questions. I keep track of everything in MS Money so for me these sorts of questions are pretty easy but they don't expect what you tell them to be perfect, just in the ballpark and they must understand that people's circumstances can change.
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I agree, but I don't want it to be escalated to a point where my affairs are reviewed by a human!
My personal conclusion is that the future was more relevant than the past, so I used a genuine approximation of what I expect my overall income to be in the next 12 months.
To a third party my affairs might look quite complicated. All of my stoozing payments, ie direct debits were going through a third current account in a third banking group. Last month I deleted them, as I will now be closing that current account, it won't be needed now that I am winding stoozing down. Anyone who follows my ramblings won't be shocked to find out that account was with First Direct. I have in the the last few days, started to bring them into Santander manually. I am, rather ironically, in the process of simplifying my affairs as they might be reviewed by UC in the future.
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Santander gives you a Select account if they think that you are a sales prospect. Recycled money is as good as income from that point of view. Nonetheless a 24/7 telephone service seems to be the only tangible benefit of a Select account. Is that ever going to matter? The plebs line is manned by UK staff too.
The KYC questions are not (or should not be) motivated by marketing. The motivation should be to assess whether your spending is covered by your income. If it is not, it is possible that you are receiving money from illegal sources. Gambling profits are not technically income, but if you can prove that you have made profits from (legal) gambling, that demonstrates that you did not receive them illegally.
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Indeed, nothing to recommend the account I was invited into. Just prestige for some people, possibly.
That's the pertinent scenario, Santander is/was the account that I pay all of my priority bills from, my hub account so to speak. But during peak stoozing, I would have had income and transfers going into it from 20+ other accounts at various times, including multiple other current accounts. I also, in the middle of this, overpaid my mortgage with close to my annual overpayment allowance.
Just one example, I had a three year cash bond mature. I paid the principal and the interest into Santander. I may have used some of that to pay the month's priority bills.
Of course I know the formal accounting treatment, but not for the purposes of this exercise. One could argue just the interest from year 3 is income (paid on maturity), but I paid current expenses from that matured capital that I invested 3 years ago. And that is one of hundreds of transactions.
Santander listed one of the income sources in their app as gambling, another was cashback.
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