Egg Policy Change ?

Jo77

Interestingly, I called EGG Customer Services- the lady looked at my account & confirmed that I had never missed a payment & had a low balance. I told her that Experian say I have an Excellent credit rating. She said she could understand how I felt, she had spoken to about 40 people today who were in a similar position to me (good payment records/credit ratings), she had seen customer reports on the BBC website & in her opinion Egg had made the wrong decison to cancel these accounts!

She couldnt give me any more information that that contained in the letter & she told me to write to the following address to complain:

Egg Servicing, Pride Parkm Riverside Road, Derby, DE99 3GG

Personally, I dont want to stay with Egg now so will be paying off my balance & transferring my Savings.

martygee

I too got one of these Egg letters. My credit rating is excellent, so I called them to ask why I was being dumped. I am glad the call was being recorded because I told them a few truths. They only want customers who like to spend lots of money and run up loads of debt, so they can squeeze them. My account was in credit, so I must be a bad customer. I think that this letter is a defarmation of character and it is about time that the little person stood up to these bullies. Any comments welcome

ravenk

I have an egg card. I have not had a letter yet. However if this is how egg are run as a company, then I don't want them to have my business anymore. I will just cancel the card and then cut it up.

I will send them a letter I think.

Starting with ...


"Due to your poor Business model, I have decided cancel your card....."

Merlot

jrawle wrote: »

It seems to me that Egg are withdrawing cards from two groups of people:

1. Those with poor credit ratings, who are over their limit, who aren't making the minimum payments, etc.
2. People with good credit ratings, who pay off their balance in full each month

I reckon this could have to do with the capping of penalty fees at £12. Credit card companies no longer make so much money out of these fees. The result is the above two groups of people no longer having access to a credit card.

So you could say this is a result of the campaign by the likes of MoneySavingExpert to fight penalty fees. Credit card fees were cut, and now this happens. The next thing is, MoneySavingExpert and others are fighting for bank charges to be scrapped. By analogy with the Egg credit card, the result will be no bank accounts for people with poor credit ratings, and monthly fees for those who never pay interest.

I think you are absolutely correct. MSE promotes consumer revenge, and now someone like Egg has decided it wants to get its own revenge, other financial institutions will follow I am sure.


Merlot

ApplePie123_3

LittleVoice wrote: »

Don't be too hasty about closing an account. When is the cash back paid out?

I have asked Egg this question and if you have less than £10 cashback accrued on your account and you close the account before the cashback anniversary date you will receive a bit fat "0". I have a £0 balance on my Egg Visa and have accrued £4+ in cashback but my anniversary date is not until August. I'm therefore going to keep the account open until August in order that I get the cashback. Imagine if 161,000 people are owed say £5 (average) and close their account and lose the cashback!!

DH and I have both received the letter. I have had the card for 7+ years, only once made 1 late payment, have never gone over my credit limit and have paid a mixture of the minimum payment/everything/over the minimum payment. DH has an Egg Visa for many years. He's never missed a payment, never gone over credit limit and paid a mixture of payments. He's had a £0 balance on card for last 12 months. We both have an excellent credit rating. Our credit rating is better than when we first applied for our Egg cards!
It's an insult to our intelligence.

trisontana

Even with the revised statement the damage has been done. Thus you get headlines such as:-

Debt-ridden customers banned from using credit cards (Melbourne Herald Sun)

Egg is stopping 160000 customers from using their credit cards because they have too much debt. (Daily Mirror)

and Banking giant blocks 160,000 customers' credit cards in crackdown on out-of-control debts (Daily Mail)

dag_2

Well, I haven't had a letter yet. No follow-up email either. I first heard about it from BBC UK News RSS feed, where the headline is given as "Egg acts over 'risky' customers."

I wouldn't even have known that it was about the bank Egg, rather than the things you make omelettes with, if the headline hadn't used the word "risky". I suppose an omelette can be risky if it hasn't been cooked properly; you might get food poisoning. But the idea of "risk" is something that is clearly associated more with financial services than with cooking.

To be fair to the BBC, the fact that the word "risky" was put in quote marks meant I was instantly aware that the idea of this risk was questionable, before even reading the article about it.

I have an Egg visa card and an Egg Money mastercard. I'm not sure how long I've had the visa card, but I think it's been about five years. But the Money card was only applied for in December last year.

Last year, the visa card was carrying a balance on which I was making minimum payments, however, I wasn't using the card for spending. Since then, I received an inheritance. So I settled off the visa card in full. I also had six other credit cards, four of which also had balances on them, which were also all paid off in full.

I then wanted to be able to pay my credit card bills in full every month thereafter. However, my Egg card was the only credit card I had where you don't have to jump through several hoops of bureaucracy to switch between minimum payment direct debit, and full balance direct debit (or vice versa). With the Egg card, you simply click a radio button on the web site, and that's it. But with all my other cards, you either had to phone up a call centre on a special-rate number, or you had to fill in a paper form, as if setting up your direct debit again for the first time. As a result of this, I then started to use my Egg visa card for all my shopping.

I also applied for an Egg Money card, for which my application was accepted. I continued to use the Egg card for all shopping until the Egg Money card turned up, and I've used the Egg Money card for all my shopping ever since.

I also have an Egg Mini Cash ISA whcih is fully subscribed for the current tax year. The rest of my savings are elsewhere.

I hope I don't get one of these letters - but if I do, I have absolutely no intention of moving my savings, the Mini Cash ISA is going to stay with Egg either way, at least for the time being. That is, unless Citigroup really are in the poo, to the extent that we might end up with a Northern-Rock-type situation. Then again, if Citigroup really were so strapped, what did they think they could gain by taking on loss-making Egg in the first place? Then again - why did Northern Rock do many of the things it did?

All I can suggest to others at this stage is not to take it personally if you get one of these letters. After all, us not paying our bills on time isn't the only risk our accounts pose to the bank. We're also all at risk of becoming victims of identity theft, and banks are often expected to cover losses from fraud. And banks stand to lose far more on unused or minimally-used accounts than they do on accounts which are consistently close to their limits. Whether or not you occasionally miss payments doesn't make much difference to this, provided that you do at least make the occasional payment now and then, and aren't at risk of actually being the fraudster yourself, or completely doing a runner on your cards.

Having said that - yep, I agree with everyone so far, Egg have massively boo-booed on their PR on this one. Having said that, I suspect that the people who post on this forum are probably not a representative sample, either of customers who have received letters, or of customers who haven't. MSE regulars do tend to be more financially savvy than the average Joe Bloggs, in my opinion. That's my 2p-worth.

ravenk

Will egg cull some of the Guinea Pigs in the TV add. The ones they dont want anymore :-)

UK007BullDog

Scrapp Egg, just moved to the Halifax and been approved for more than I need. Just need to wait now on the paperwork.

YorkshireBoy

ravenk wrote: »

Will egg cull some of the Guinea Pigs in the TV add. The ones they dont want anymore :-)

Already done. Apparently they found out one of them missed a payment in 2004 so they got rid of the lot!

Now using a dolphin called Raoul.