Companies that require / encourage you to use a certain bank

Yes, they only pay to Lloyds/Halifax/BoS account. :woman_shrugging:t2:

And what would happen if you quietly CASSed away your Lloyds account?

Nothing, probably. Your employer probably wouldn’t even know.

Yes, you can at least I did when I worked there, basically you couldn’t be onboarded without a Lloyds account but nobody cared after.

Can confirm this is still the case. They even provide Bank of America branch facilities on campus.

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I’ve created a new thread so we can talk about this without going too too far off topic!

Do Apple employees (do they have a name? Applers?) get any perks? Or is there a kick back from the bank to Apple for effectively delivering them thousands of salaried accounts without any individual cost of acquisition?

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Again, from what I heard from friends, most people living there just use Revolut as a spending account. They get paid in cash/in the employer’s preferred account then transfer over. Banks there love fees too, so it’s better to use Revolut

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Not sure on any kickbacks for Apple promoting them, but there are perks for being both an Apple employee and a Bank of America customer. My friend isn’t too clear on what they are because he doesn’t personally use the benefits that come with his account. So all I know on this front is that there are no fees where there otherwise would normally be.

One example of this, is my friend was able to send me money via Monzo.me as a test way back when Apple Pay was still supported, and they were charged no fees for doing so. Without the benefits, they would likely have charged in some capacity for making a foreign currency payment. It still impresses me to this day, that my friend in the US was able to send me money via Monzo.me for free, and instantly, because it’s a simple debit card transaction on their side of things, but that’s for another thread!

Given how common these setups are in the US, I’d guess it more or less comes down to the way the banking sector is setup in the US, so it just keep things easy if both the company and their employees are with the same bank. Salary will be faster, there will be no fee to send or receive it etc. They don’t have anything that resembles are faster payments network, and interbank transfers are not always free either.

The upside to the no fee benefit, is they can withdraw their salary, from any ATM, and deposit into another bank of their choosing, for free. A wire would still invoke a charge from the receiving bank. I recall in the past when I sent a friend payment for some merchandise from the campus store using TransferWise (my US account) to their chase account, they were charged them $18 to receive it and the whole process took 3 days to complete.

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Wow, do CASS really retain the old sort/acc numbers?

Not currently - but the old sort code and account number are used to forward money to your new details for a defined period (we’re talking years).

An alternative model would be to port account numbers like you can with mobile phone numbers - but I don’t think anyone is exploring that right now.

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Damn that would be cool. I realise would need massive changes in how things worked. But what a concept.

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Yes, it would mean massive changes as currently sort codes are wedded to banks, even “branches” (either physical or virtual) of the bank, so it would be a big change.

I don’t expect it to happen because most people probably don’t have the same attachment to their bank details as they do to their phone number, so there isn’t a huge incentive for banks to develop the capability.

It has been explored by the treasury select committee as an idea in the past, though, so it wouldn’t be a crazy suggestion!

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Speak for yourself! I absolutely loved the N26 sort code! Primarily because of how it tied into the brand. 04-00-26. Monzo’s is a pretty nice sort code too. The brilliance here is how simple these are to remember!

I’d have loved the opportunity for my N26 account details to have lived on by switching to another bank.

Can’t say I care about any others, nor can I remember them without having to look them up!

In contrast, I can’t say I’ve ever been attached to my mobile number until Sky Mobile came along with a brand new block of numbers exclusive to their network. I got in early, and was assigned a pretty decent number, so I like my number for the first time now. The second a spammer gets ahold of it though, I’ll get rid. But I’ve been very vigilant, and managed to elude them thus far!

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Yes, I know what you mean.

Some of my accounts have a special sort code which I am personally fond of, but I think we are in the minority!

Especially when the average account at Bank X is usually a nonsense jumble of numbers with no relevance at all!

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I’ve worked there for a long time and I can say for sure that this is not the case… :man_shrugging:

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Both Monzo and N26 did pretty decent jobs at assigning relatively memorable account numerals too! My Barclays account number was easy to remember too! I know those ones by heart.

I think it was Halifax, but in the earlier days I think they just assigned them incrementally! I have a friend who’s account number is a string of 5 zeros followed by three other numbers.

It seems we’ve drifted a little off topic here, as fascinating as how these things work are! :laughing:

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I did think that’s was absolute wrong. I recall when I worked for Halifax HO, at the time we had to be paid using one of their own products. That soon changed a year or 2 later, bonus was we had our own branch in HO that was always fully staffed, so no queuing in the high street.

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I have an account like that at TSB, which isn’t that old.

I always thought someone must have switched away and, after a suitable time, I eventually got their recycled number!

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yeah, it changed about twenty years ago :joy: I think it was to pre-empt EU anti-competition regs from memory…

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Yes sounds about right timescale wise. I was 16 at the time and think by the time I was 18 we could use any account.

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To be fair to them, at that time (pre-Faster Payments) it probably would have been easier and cheaper for them to process payments as internal credits to their own accounts.

Otherwise, they would have had to use BACS Direct Credits, effectively paying their employees three days early to make sure the payment arrived on time.

That would have had cash-flow implications which, it is easy to see, would be best avoided.