Business banking news review: week ending 1 Aug 2013
No one likes being stuck in a dead-end personal or business bank account, but despite that it seems like nobody can seem to muster the energy to switch!
In fact, a new research study speaks to just this issue. According to Which? Money, even though Brits who do switch from financial service provider say that it’s relatively painless it’s like pulling teeth getting the majority of consumers to go through the process.
The figures speak for themselves: only 2 per cent of adult Brits have changed current accounts over the last 12 months. The figures don’t get much better when you extend the time frame to two years, as it only rises to 5 per cent – or one out of every twenty Brits!
On top of that, fully half of the survey respondents couldn’t be arsed to switch their current account even once over their lifetime. Now you can characterise me as a bit of a bastard for saying this, but that’s just bloody daft for what it’s worth.
The biggest barrier to switching, according to the survey, was that UK banks and building societies are all so terrible that it wouldn’t make a difference. Now there I can kind of agree – most of our high street banks are indeed absolutely rubbish – I mean just look at the scandal-of-the-week that Barclays is involved in and you’ll see what I mean.
Though it’s funny – I also discovered this week that the Government is actually stepping in to make it easier to switch banks. It’s investing some £750 million into the network software and hardware required to facilitate such a plan, and that includes a television, billboard, magazine, and newspaper advert campaign set to be launched this September in an effort to make the whole market more competitive.
Now this I can get behind. In fact I think it will absolutely help to not just educate consumers about how easy it actually is to switch from a terrible current account with too many fees and too low an interest rate and find a better one; if it has the intended knock-on effect of forcing banks and building societies to start offering more competitive deals the UK banking consumer is set up to benefit quite nicely.
It’s about time someone started looking out for us, isn’t it? These bankers and their golden parachutes can suck eggs as far as I’m concerned; let’s get a couple of accounts out there that don’t cost you an arm and a leg and then maybe they can talk about earning those ridiculously high bonuses.