Direct To Your Wallet/Purse
 

First Direct bank, owned by HSBC, is the first to screw their customers more than they already do.

The proposal is that a current account holder will be charged £10 per month just for having an account unless it contains a minimum of £1,500 or the customer takes on another of their services like a savings account or insurance.

First Bank’s comment, “This is aimed mainly at those accounts that are little used or dormant.”

Other banks are keeping an eye on the outcome.

In a word GREED has come to the fore.

The banks already pay us the smallest amount of interest that they can get away with but our money in their bank earns them far more than they pay us.

OK. I accept that they have heavy overheads in providing a banking service and have to pay the ubiquitous shareholders an annual dividend but this latest, “let’s fleece Joe Public some more” has more to do with First Bank maintaining their profit margins than anything else. If I had an account with First Bank, and I haven’t, I would switch fast.

I also heard the other day that Credit Card issuers are considering making an annual charge of £35 to help off set the fraud that occurs. With the interest that they charge they could afford to pay US £35 pa for using their Credit Card.

Maybe it is all my fault because in all the years that I have had a Credit Card I have never once paid any interest. I have always settled the account in full each month. So the bank issuing the Credit Card that I have, have never made any profit from me. Not one single red cent. But they have tried to force me into paying some charges from time to time by not sending me the monthly statement. If the statement hasn’t arrived 7 days after it is due I find out what the balance is and send them a cheque to cover the amount.

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Sounds to me like a touch of blackmail. With all the money that banks make I cannot understand why they want to go down this route. Maybe its time the head honcho's took less in a salery and leave Mr and Mrs Public alone.

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I don't think its blackmail.. just good old fashioned explotation. I would guess that for a sizable proportion of people the only time they have over £1500 in the bank is pay day! if the rest of the money grabbing banks follow suit then its a rotten deal for most people.
Am I right in thinking pensions are paid directly into bank accounts these days?..if so then pensioners will have no choice but pay.. it boils down to racketeering, Al Copone would have been proud to have thought it up!

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Yeh saw their Boss on the news this morning & to be honest he couldn't answer much, in one breath he's charging people that haven't got 1500 in the bank per month [as if anyone but rich people do have!!] so thats most of us out & then he says when questioned about poorer people going to suffer he said oh but they wont be charge on majority of accounts that dont have 1500 in :confused:

TBH i dont think they have thought about it properly & its implications & just saw ££££ signs from their customers yet they are not suffering with profit loss talk about greed - the implications could be detrimental if banks started to do this as most benefit payments now go thro the bank account too, so in effect needing a bank but being charged to get their money & pay bills - who would lose out yet again - the poor & the hardworking people again the rich stave off scot free!!!:angry:

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These charges will hit the poorer patrons of the banks as they will come into force for those who don't put in £1500 per month....as always the richer customers will not pay anything. I don't know if it is true but I read somewhere that the banks make £1100 per SECOND. I believe that Jambutty is right when he says it is all down to greed.
I know that if my bank were to bring in charges for my current account (that has never been in the red)...I would move every red cent to a bank that didn't charge.
I too, have a credit card that is paid off in full every month, so they make no profit from me there.

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Well I can see one good thing coming out of it, if people have a savings account they'll not have to pay, and they'll be able to save money better!
Unless of course your income=outgoing then you're pretty screwd with this new system as there isnt an excess to start saving..

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Let me clarify a few things,

1) Its not that you have to keep 1500 quid in your account, you have to have 1500 quid go through your account. i.e. if you pay in that amount from 2 salaries then its free no matter how much is in the account(minimum wage is ~10K/year or 800 quid a month so 2 min wage salaries will be enough)

2) if you have another product ,savings account, CC(even if like JB you pay it off each month), agreed overdraft, etc then its free.

3) Banks are a business! They exist to make money be that for shareholders or a CEO is absolutely irrelevant. If they don't then they are out of business and you would soon be screaming where your savings had gone. There is a risk to almost all their investments and they have to cover all risks due to LEGAL requirements that are set by the goverment. You may not understand it but its not normal people where banks make all these millions of profit. the general public actually COST money to service their accounts, I haven't heard anyone thanking them for this service over the last 20-30 years!

4) and this is the biggy!!! the UK is nearly UNIQUE in having a free banking service. Abroad you pay for writing cheques/making ATM withdrawals, Standing orders etc. If you lived abroad you would be used to paying for your banking service and this would not be newsworthy at all.

So before you start shouting teh odds, please make sure you understand what you would be looking at if you lived abroad.

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I have travelled extensively in Australia and I have a bank account there.....and yes you do get charged for having the privilege of having your money kept in a relatively safe place........and while I agree that banks ARE a business..they all seem to be making an awful lot of money. I would still move my account to a bank that didn't charge if my bank were to bring in charges.

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I had a bad enough time opening an account because of not working. Now if they start charging if you dont put £1500 in your account in a month then i'm out of luck - it would take 3 months to put that through my account. I'd have to pay unless i could find another bank to take me on. Its not just me though what about pensioners, unemployed, sick what do they do. By the way what does a housewife do - she maybe has an account since before she got married and its lying there maybe £100 in it for emergencies?

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as usual it SUCKS, and the better off cannot see it,cos it don,t affect them.:(

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Try this The Consumer Action Group

Ten steps to reclaim bank fees | This is Money

“The test still remains whether the charges are a true reflection of the bank’s actual costs” said The Bank Action Group spokesman. “If the charges make profits then they are unlawful.

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The Goverement have forced all banks to provide a 'basic bank account' which must be such that it can't go overdrawn. I believe that these must also be free so there should always be an account suitable for those on low incomes/pensioners etc (If you already have an agreed overdraft then I believe the other accounts are also free under First Directs plans).


Just because something has been in a particular way for some time why should PRIVATE companies be forced to keep them that way? As I said before, Banks exist to make a profit just as the corner cafe or the bloke on the market. You don't begrudge them a living so why should larger companies be tied to certain level of profit? If you look at Profit/Turnover you will find that banks actually make a small % profit against small businesses.

You can vote with your feet now if you don't agree with this, First Direct is part of HSBC aka Midland. Move all your accounts/loans/CCs/ etc to one of the other banks and make it known that you are leaving HSBC because of their decision to charge. The news does filter up in the companies to the higher levels and CEOs aren't daft enough to ignore peoples feelings, if they see a significant number of people joining their bank because its free to use then they are likely to keep it that way to attract more customers.

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But you can't pay bills or use direct debit with the basic account, its reaching a point were the only way to lead a normal life financially is to have more than a basic savings account, I mean peolpe are literally forced to use banking sevices and the banks know it!.. its extortion of people reicieving tax credits or a state pension. And what about family allowance? I don't think its more than 20 quid a week for one child..so you have to pay £10 for the privilage of having it paid into your account?
Cashman is right.. its only the better off getting away scot free again who don't see anything wrong.

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But basic bank accounts DO support DD and in some cases S/Os

Basic Bank Accounts

Here is a list of what services each banks offering is

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I have a basic account at the Alliance n Leicester and have DD's with it. Though the page link provided by Entwisi says they dont do standing orders they do on mine, but that might have changed since I opened mine.

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It was reported that in order to qualify for a free service a current account would have to have a minimum of £1,500 in it or using one of their other products as well and during an interview the First Bank spokesperson confirmed it. The First Bank FAQ’s http://www.firstdirect.com/faqs/index.shtml reveal.

Quote:

Will I be charged for banking with first direct? Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded), keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 or have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.

I don’t know about anyone else but I read that as having a minimum of £1,500 in the account at all times regardless of how much is pushed through the account.

You are right about bank charges outside the UK entwisi but we don’t live abroad. We live in the UK and today in the UK it is newsworthy. So it is not shouting the odds as you put it. It is bringing the issue out in the open for discussion and comment

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Nope, your reading is incorrect, the comma defines it the statement by the final operator i.e. OR

Will I be charged for banking with first direct?
Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded), keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 OR have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.

Re: Direct To Your Wallet/Purse
 

No, it's an either/or. If you have a spare £1,500 kicking around doing nothing and leave the balance as a minimum of that all the time that is one option. Another option is to have £1,500 going through the account each month (ie 2 salaries in and all your DDs and SOs out as long as a minimum of £1,500 goes in.) The third option is to have another one of their products. A savings account for instance - they make money on that by paying you less than they get from investing/loaning the money.


Got interrupted by a phone call whilst I was typomg that so there was a delay!) :D

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I am with First Direct and they are the best bank I have ever been with. Their service has been second to none..... and would be happy to pay the fee....luckily I don't have to as I also have a savings account, visa card and offset mortgage with them. They have sent a letter to all customers advising them if they will be charged or not and if they would be liable for the charge, if there are other options they could go for to avoid paying it :)

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Mine came yesterday, maybe they are staggering them so they don't all arrive at once

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You don’t need the letter WillowTheWhisp just go to the First Bank web site and read the FAQ’s.

I’ll give you a helping hand. Try http://www.firstdirect.com/faqs/index.shtml

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And if you did read it it clearly says

PAY IN AT LEAST 1500 OR MAINTAIN etc

so as Willow quite rightly says, if you pay in 100 pounds and withdrew it and paid it back in 15 times you will have satisfied the criteria. thus you interpretation is NOT correct Mr JB. There is NO requirement to have 1500 quid in your account at any time.

Semantics is a wonderful subject for discussion, however this isn't even slightly ambiguous.

Ian

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And then people wonder why make such a palaver about correct grammar and punctuation. :rolleyes:

This couldn't have been worded more clearly. Just imagine the problems caused when things aren't.

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I’ve just searched the forum member database for a Mr JB and there isn’t one. However I interpret your post #28 as being directed at me. Surely it is a common courtesy to address a person by their proper name?

Which part of:

Quote:

Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded), keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 or have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.

and

Quote:

By month we mean calendar month. As a guide, to calculate your average monthly balance, add together the end of day balances for each day during the month in question, then divide your total by the number of days in that month.

do you not understand entwisi?

If you pay in £100 the balance at the end of that day will be £100. If you withdraw that £100 the next day and then deposit it again the same day that day’s balance will be £100. If you did that for all 30 days in a 30 days month the daily balance would be £100 each day. Thus the total daily balances would be £3,000 at an average of £100 and thus liable for the £10 fee. However if you did the same but with £1,500 or more then there would be no fee.

I agree that Semantics is a wonderful topic for discussion. However how would you interpret “(internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded),”? Withdrawing cash from an account and then depositing that same amount back in is tantamount to an internal transfer. Whether First Bank take that view remains to be seen but it is irrelevant to the issue and that is, as WillowTheWhisp has so elogantly quoted, “keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500” How can that be interpreted in any other way than to what it states?

Yes WillowTheWhisp

Quote:

You will be charged £10 for any month you do not pay in at least £1,500 or maintain an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500, unless you take out an additional product with us (see answer to earlier question for details of which products qualify).

It couldn’t be clearer. But aren’t you forgetting “or maintain an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500,”

I will ask you the same question WillowTheWhisp, “Do you understand it now or are you going to keep on contradicting yourself?”

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However your total deposits will have been £1500 and have therefore met the criteria. It does not say a balance of £1500 to be paid in. it says that £1500 must go through your account and this fits it

No it quite clearly is not. When you withdraw the cash it is outside of First Direct and as such a deposit of £100 is then a new transaction

But as previously described, the criteria are governed by an OR statement, that means that any single one meeting its criteria means that the outcome is true.

See above, its an OR expression

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The banks want to tread lightly with this tho because without people depositing money there would be no banks or their services, funny how the costs of things go up tenfold but your incomes dont match it:rolleyes:

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OR

It's not the same as 'and'. :rolleyes:

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First Direct Bank is recorded as making £34 BILLIONs in profit last year......Ok so they are in it to make a profit, we have established that......£34billion is a good whack of money to me.

Other banks are said to be watching the outcome of these charges, so it is likely that there will be more snouts in the trough soon.

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I just think that we have been forced into using the banks in the first place IE:- wages get paid into bank no cash in hand allowed any more.
benifits get paid into banks no post office use any more, so you see i dont think we should pay its been forced upon us to use the bank in the first place!

Why should people have to change accounts to prevent having to pay fee's.

Why fix it if its not broken?

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Margaret, First Direct is part of HSBC which is a massive global bank, nowhere near that much was made from personal customers, the vast majority come from Investment banking, private clients (i.e. mega rich), business loans etc.

The personal retail financial industry is normally lucky to even break even.

e.g. did you know that if your account is with first direct and you use a Barclays cashpoint (via Link) it costs FD 50p for each transaction? so if you get a balance and then withdraw cash it costs them a pound. yet poeple here think they should provide all these services for free????

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Yes Ian, I did know that First Direct was part of the HSBC group and I know that much of their profits come from investment and business.....however, I didn't know the bit about Link facilities being charged to the bank.

I don't think that services should be free, because in effect they aren't really.
The bank gets to use our money for their investments......we get nothing in the way of interest on a current account.....and personally I have never been overdrawn.....I have no agreed overdraft because I am very prudent with the money we possess.
As stated in other threads, you cannot live life today without a bank account.My pension goes directly into my account with no option for any other means of payment.
If the fee charging is seen by other banks to be a success, then many other banks will follow and perhaps will not be as 'lenient' in their protocols as FD are being. This will inevitably lead to the poorer people in the population being worse off. Bank really don't want to provide services to the poor and the pensioners because they make very little money out of them.

This is how the charging system in Oz started out....now EVERYONE pays for all bank services.

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So why not use a savings account for all but a small amount of money and setup SOs between your accounts so that money is in the right place for when DDs etc go out, once its setup it will run like clockwork and you will get teh most benefit from your money. a lot of banks even offer auto top ups from savings if your current account is about to go overdrawn.

Banks may not want to provde services for the poor but teh gov has already made sure that they have to free of charge

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Mostly it is laziness on my part,but I suppose in some respects I don't feel comfortable with those kind of arrangements...call me a control freak if you like, but I don't like DD's or SO's. So far in my adult life I have been fortunate not to get into any financial scrapes......but I know of those who have. I have some investments and that is where the savings go....and before you ask...YES I know that I pay administration costs on those savings.
A savings account would be just too easy to access...and I have a hubby with expensive tastes:)

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It may have escaped your notice entwisi and WillowTheWhisp but the humble comma has other uses than pretending to be the word OR.

It can also pretend to be the word AND as in “John and Fred and Mary and Susan all went to the fair.” That is a bit incongruous and the sentence would ordinarily be written as, “John, Fred, Mary and Susan all went to the fair.”

Thus in the sentence:
Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded), keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 or have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.
the comma after the closing bracket could be either AND or OR. Which is the question.

Well considering that the author of the sentence wrote “…….. excess of £1,500 or have an additional ……..” and did not use the word or in “……excluded), keep an average ……” but used a comma instead, it is not unreasonable to read that comma to mean AND. I feel that if the author intended the comma to mean OR he would have written OR and not put a comma and had intended it to mean AND.

Now some professor of English language could come along and explain why that comma meant OR or AND but the FAQ’s were not written for professors of English language but for bank customers.

Thus neither you or I are right or wrong and we should agree to disagree on that point until it can be clarified by First Bank. However not having an account with First Bank it does not concern me directly but First Bank customers need to get the point clarified before 1st February 2007, otherwise they could be labouring under a mishaprehention and find themselves being charged the £10 fee.

I would just add that this sort of ambiguity is not uncommon where money matters are concerned.

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I'm sorry Jambutty but you are quite simply wrong, the comma does have the ability to be either "and" or "or" and THIS IS BASED on the final operator. In the case of everything YOU have quoted it clearly states OR. The FAQs were written to be clear and concise using the correct English syntax that would also stand up in a court of law. They are not ambiguous and to be honest if you think they are then perhaps you should consider your command of the language we claim to speak in this land. To use the operator "or" twice in the same sentance as you suggest would break the rules of grammar.


Perhaps its not what is written that is unclear, it is your comprehension that is flawed


PS, as has been pointed out, £1 in a savings account is enough to stop any charges.

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I’m not going to argue with you about my comprehension of English grammar because in this day and age that has become subjective. I would point out that the FAQ’s were written recently for the people living today not yesterday.

Before bowing out of this topic I will confine myself to one final sentence that demonstrates the use of OR several times and still be grammatically correct.

If I intended to kill myself I could do it by jumping off a cliff or putting a bullet through my head or hanging myself or indeed taking poison. I could have used three commas instead of three of the OR’s but either way the sentence is correct.

Verb sap!

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As a First Direct current account holder I can say that they DO pay interest on their current account. They also operate a 24 hour phone line which is answered by a person (not an automated system) in this country ...tell a lie I think one of the call centres is in scotland :rolleyes: :)

I have banked with them in excess of 10 years and have not had one bad phone call. In fact have had many a good laugh with someone on the other end of the phone. And they have always been very helpful and alot of things you need to sort out with the bank are done instantly whilst you are on the phone

I receive a text message every morning from them advising me of debits and credits on my account.

They on a couple of occasions have helped me out of a sticky situation and they are probably the most accessible bank I have been with.

I have only just recently set up the offset mortgage and savings account and yet my letter clearly states that on past activity of my account I would not be charged the £10 fee. I can assure you I don't have £1500 sat in my current account all month!!!! (I wish) :)

But as I have said in a previous post I would have been only too happy to pay it as I think the service they offer is second to none!! (including the free cash withdrawal's from any bank)

anyway thats my twopenneth worth :D

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Even taking that example of yours, if you did use commas it doesn't mean that any of the commas could be a substitute for the word 'and' - in order to mean 'and' you would have to use the word 'and'.

If First Direct had wanted it to mean 'and' they would have had to write:





Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded)and keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 or have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.

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(Oh I do wish Mister Jambutty would answer me in the prisoner's drug treatment thread, as to how I put words in his mouth, and leave the semantics alone in this one.):rolleyes:

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