Cashback on your bills
1% cashback (up to £10 a month) on selected household bills when you pay by Direct Debit
Cashback on your essential spend
1% cashback (up to £10 a month) at supermarkets
and on travel costs when you
use your debit card (exclusions apply)
Exclusive savings rates
An optional savings account with 4.00% AER / 3.93% gross (variable) interest on balances up to £4,000 (includes 0.50% AER (variable) bonus rate for the first 12 months from opening)
Arranged overdraft
Subject to status - learn more in the ‘Overdrafts and charges’ section
How it works
Pay a £3 monthly fee to maintain the account
Pay at least £500 into your account each month
Have 2 active Direct Debits
You’re over 18 and live in the UK permanently
This is a paper-free account – learn more in ‘Other account information’
You had me up till the £3/month. These things are made so difficult to calculate your returns and whether it’s beneficial based on your particular spending, it’s not worth the effort, especially with the ‘bonus rate’ on the savings, and whatever list of exclusions apply.
It’s more than likely they’ll let them keep their existing accounts, but incentivise them to change to the new account type.
Although in fairness the Choice account got rolled out at £10 a month for reduced fees and got very quickly pulled in a couple months, but as far as I’m aware they let them keep their accounts if they wanted to.
It does seem like Santander is doing a lot of changes after being stagnant for a while. They’ve made a few other small changes across the app, introduced Santander Boosts, opened up those limited edition savings accounts, created Santander Edge, new card designs.
Thought I’d share a little bit of my experience when I triggered Santander’s fraud detection this morning while trying to do a large transfer out of my E-saver to another one of my accounts with HSBC. I was immediately blocked out of internet banking and I received an automated call from Santander asking me to call them.
We first confirmed the details of the receiving account and they indeed matched with my name. It then took >35 minutes to answer the agent’s questions, read through fraud statements, call me back on my mobile number, confirm previous transaction amounts (from memory as I had no internet banking), confirm debit card details, re-confirm I’m not part of a scam, and so on. I don’t think negatively of this process (of course!) other than the experience seemed on a fine line between thorough and long-winded/repetative. They thoroughly did their due dilegence but handy to know you should keep your bank card and a statement handy for this sort of occurance as once blocked out of internet banking (attached to a current account I don’t really use), my mind went blank
