Unsure why I’ve received this text message today. I’ve never held any accounts with Virgin Money and haven’t held a Nationwide account in many years. Weird.
Also, no instructions on how to stop receiving further messages or even a reply to number. I thought those were required?
Very strange. I’m a customer of both and I haven’t received a text message.
I’m feeling left out too 
So I guess if Nationwide customers cannot use VM branches (as per this message, directed to Nationwide customers), the reverse must also be true, that VM customers (bereft of branches in the South) are not welcome to use Nationwide branches in the foreseeable future.
For a good while I expect. To get an idea of how it might happen in due course, what happened with the CoOp and Britannia was that the Britannia people moved into the CoOp branches. That could really only happen where branches were reasonably close presumably.
Give them a minute! Two completely separate systems, procedures etc.
Harmonisation takes time. All to say nothing of the mammoth task which will be combining the many systems…
Not to mention that Nationwide are only just phasing out printing on passbooks with dot-matrix printers!
As Virgin Money have clearly demonstrated, with some products appearing to be run on legacy Clydesdale systems and others still on Northern Rock.
They need to do what they said they’d do at the very start i.e. CASS everybody over.
At the very best, the branch staff will have both software(s) on their computers to assist customers. I would never expect the IT systems to be merged fully within the next decade, the only way that it will feel seamless to the customer is if they as said above, CASS everybody over to Nationwide
Really easy way to do It… issue update to Virgin app to replace by Nationwide app and simultaneously CASS everybody over. Behind the scenes, the credit card processing is done by the same place already.
Teensy bit high risk though 
Signed up to a FlexPlus account 2 months ago. They still haven’t taken my monthly charges? is this normal? or do they charge it once a year
They charge it from the month following sign-up. So you get a free first month, or nearly two if you time it right.
It’s charged at the end of the month.
I am on my second month and still no charge, maybe it’s two i am not sure. Either way i’ve just made sure there’s enough money in there to cover it each month
If you opened it at the start of September, they’ll not charge until the end of October.
When have they said they’d do that?
I don’t think it’d even be an option to do this, as it’d effectively lose everyone’s transaction history.
There’s a lot of data to transfer in these kind of maneouvers and CASS only covers a subset of it.
Virgin said they were going to do that way back but never did.
They would need to do a kind of CASS+ to keep the transaction history.
On reflection, I would go down this route if I were in charge, albeit rolling the update out gradually over some months. Trial run first, then do the easy cases and work up from there.
It wouldn’t be CASS at all, surely, it’d be a transfer between systems - sort codes and account numbers remain the same (unlike CASS). Not unlike TSB (x2), A&L + Abbey + Bradford & Bingley, Woolwich in to Barclays etc.
Before the merger with CYBG, Virgin didn’t have many current account holders, and the proposal was to migrate them to the CYBG systems using CASS:
Virgin Money takeover by CYBG completed: what it means for you - Which? News
“There are around 100,000 Virgin Money personal current accounts to move, which CYBG plans to do using the automated Current Account Switch Service (CASS).”
As already mentioned, in the end they never did that.
