NatWest will validate your gross income, so you’ll be fine.
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Are NatWest Group banks insistent that the savings need to be held with them (per the ts and cs) or are they more flexible, and willing to accept those who don’t hold it with them in the hopes of tempting them across?
If you don’t hold your savings with NatWest, how would they know that you’ve got any savings?
Statements
Pretty sure you’ve got to hold the savings with them.
Wouldn’t be so sure about that. Clearly they would like you to have all the cash with them, but they don’t offer a full range of products so some people couldn’t just up sticks and move to them. Yes, a requirement for the banking services presumably, but maybe not if you were meeting the criteria through investments perhaps?
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The requirements of Ulster are different.
To qualify for Premier, you will normally need a sole annual income of at least £75,000 paid into your Ulster Bank account (£100,000 in the case of a joint application), or savings and investments of at least £100,000 held with us or another financial institution (proof of savings required)
So the savings/investments don’t have to be held with them. Income requirements are lower too (salaries are lower in NI).
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Has anyone had any luck with meeting the criteria at one NWG organisation, and then asking them to transfer the status to all NWG please? I.e. Meet Ulster Criteria, then transfer status to NatWest and RBS regardless of if we meet NW and RBS criteria. Not sure of any real benefits of the non-ufirst Ulster premier account.
I was thinking that myself. Quite like the idea of upgrading the C&C account to a real premier one without needing to close investment accounts to do It.
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NatWest requirements
£100k sole income or £120k joint income paid into your NatWest account
£100k savings or investments held with us
£500k mortgage borrowing with us
That’s from their website.
Yeah, it is different criteria but wondered if they’d re-certify premier status within the group. Maybe not
I suspect that they’d be more lenient if you were using an investment account to meet the £100k. As far as I’m aware they don’t do self investment accounts themselves so you couldn’t just transfer such a thing to them. I’m sure there’s other similar instances too.
Basically, I suspect they mean across the group £100k of banking things (cash, savings, etc.) but investments would be a different matter simply because they don’t do them in-house. If you were to have a £500k shares portfolio, I don’t know that they could handle that (or maybe you’d get offered services from Coutts?).
On the investment front, RBS/NatWest/Ulster seem to have stopped offering this from 2012. They currently only seem to offer a choice of five investment funds so transferring a chunky amount to them is a non runner hence I’d say they’d accept it staying elsewhere. Coutts offer more but even they require you to transfer their SIPP out when you want to collect on your pension. So, if they’re saying you have to transfer it out at some point, I’d say it would be OK to have It out at the start.
Tbh, I wouldn’t want to transfer any more savings to NWG other than the Digital Regular Savers at NW and RBS. A portion of the sum is in investment accounts, but not sure that NW/RBS would accept me for premier status with them with 10% of the savings requirement held internally, and the rest elsewhere.
I think they’d expect the £100k savings with them if that’s how you were meeting the requirement. However, I think it would be a different story if you could meet It with investments. There’s just no way they could expect you to transfer, say, a £500k portfolio elsewhere into just their five funds.
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I dont think they would - otherwise you could open an Ulster account on the lower salary requirement and then use that as a way to get the Natwest and RBS accounts.
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You get the higher daily payment/transfer limit of 50k instead of 20k
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I’ve tried to do it, but not got anywhere. NWG support always seem clueless when I’ve tried to get them to understand what I’m asking for, and just filling out the form and hoping they’d figure it out got rejected.
BTW does your ufirst comment mean there’s some serious difference with the ufirst account? (Is it still available?)
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Seems to still be available. I’ve not really looked into it though, as ufirst has a monthly fee.