10 Sep 2013

Your savings have gone down the plug ’ole, Your savings have gone the plug… I am giving up on saving with the UK retail banks and building societies. I can potentially live with low interest rates if the service is competent and not annoying, but it appears that customers willing to be paid badly are losers who must expect to be treated badly. Last week a young man who was not born when I started working in the City told me that I would need to book a 30 minute appointment with him on a different day in order to be offered 1.7% on a two year fixed bond. In a rival establishment, another half hour appointment was required if I wanted to switch out of a savings account that pays 0.2%. In each case, the only convenient option was to close the account. This is fine with me, but why does it seem to be what the retail banks want? Here are three reasons. First, the bank rate is at a record low (0.5%) and the new Governor of the Bank of England is very keen to convince us that it is going to stay there. The experiences of the last few years have lowered savers’ expectations and have caused them, understandably, to be suspicious of those who offer surprisingly attractive interest rates. Why are they bidding for our money? Surely it must be safer to deposit our hard-earned with those who appear to be indifferent to it? Secondly, the regulations introduced to protect us from unscrupulous financial advisers have caused many of the banks to withdraw from the advice business. Since 1 January, independent financial advisers have to charge a fee rather than take a commission out of what they sell you. If banks were ever pretending to offer independent advice, they cannot do so now. A person with financial flair and ambition would not stick it for long as a customer advisor in a retail bank reading out the small print and asking us to sign here and here. Consequently, nobody working in the local branch of your bank really gives a toss what you do with your savings. Thirdly, another...