Top Bank Accounts Discussion Area

As MSE Dan is hopefully reading this thread, having started it, I'll repeat a couple of comments I have made elsewhere.

(1) Customer service. For example, you recommend Abbey on the basis of their 8% interest offer. I would not recommend Abbey to anyone. They have had a string of problems recently, including major ebanking outages in May and the inability to send out debit cards on time. There is a post on this board about them being unable to pay interest, and I had a problem last Wednesday when their systems were down and they couldn't give me a banker's draft. Their complaints procedure is in meltdown and they are offering money to people not to take their complaint to the Ombudsman. I know all banks get it wrong sometimes but if you read this board they are getting far more than their fair share. So - if you are going to recommend Abbey's 8% offer, why not add a caveat to say that many customers report appalling service and direct people to this forum?

(2) What's the deal like permanently? Again, you recommend Abbey because they offer 8% for a year. But other banks offer a slightly lower rate permanently. People are not going to change their bank accounts every year because it's too much trouble, whereas they will with credit cards and savings accounts. So please can we have some analysis of what the best buy is once the initial offer runs out.

Can someone clarify how these current accounts (specifically Abbey and A&L) work? Are you able to keep a balance of over £2500 in the account and still receive the advertised rate on the first £2500, nominal on the rest or does it revert to a poor rate on the entire balance if £2500 is exceeded?

After having a lot of unnecessary and unfair charges from HSBC, my partner and I decided to switch to A&L under recommendation from this site. It seemed almost too good to be true and it was... We were told our overdrafts would be matched if we allowed them to do our direct debit/standing order switching. I found out today, after spending an hour on the phone to the Liverpool call centre, that in fact they can't match my overdraft BECAUSE the A&L branch didn't fax our bank statements over to head office. In addition, I was also told that they would NOT match my overdraft unless I could show that I've been in credit with my HSBC account for 2 days or more in the last 3 months. (No one had previously told me this?!?!) As it's a graduate account I have not been in credit for 4 years and the whole point of switching to A&L was for the interest free overdraft.
The overdraft matching criteria is fair enough but we were not informed of it as the branch were too busy trying to sell us loans and life insurance and trying to get us to remortgage whilst opening the current accounts for us. I'm not very impressed.

lukemarson wrote: »

I bank with Barclays who allow this but I want to change now they've introduced a device to log into online banking. I use my bank in a number of locations and I really don't want to have to carry it around everywhere.

AFAIK Barclays are the only bank to offer this facility with cashing cheques. I tried it a few times but was put off by the words of the manager to the effect that it's always at their discretion (sort of like: "It's not broken, so don't go using it too often"). I now 'shop' at Lloyds instead who pay in-credit interest against cheques up to £1000 per day immediately. However their interest rate of 4.25% only goes up to balance of £2500, so it is awkward to have the cheques sat there for 4 clear working days (taking up the £2.5k balance as it were)

I'm glad you get the use out of Barclay's online banking facilities as I find their site pretty awful for the way you have to keeping submitting and calling up new screens (and read all the prompts plastered over everything) to do a simple task like set up a standing order - about four different screens if I recall. Surely if you can take that you can put up with the minor addition of a calculator pad no?

The article is not up to date as regards Nationwide. The authorised overdraft rate went up from 7.75 to 9.9 EAR on 1st November. A better account than them appears to be N&P Gold (mentioned above) which pays 4.75 gross (4.85 AER) on balances up to £5000 not £3000 if you pay in £1500 per month - and at that level of funding the overdraft costs what NW used to - 7.74 EAR. The other thing I would complain about the Nationwide account (even though I have it for 20 years!) is that credit interest is not added monthly - only on 31 December. [I got £50 net one Christmas!! - that was a few years ago mind!] Maybe they will introduce this as they must be the only current account like this....