It’s also why savings providers keep popping up. The UK appears as a very attractive market on paper, but they tend to hit a brick wall when it comes to convincing people to change.
LHV have publicly said that this stat is the reason they have entered the UK market. They reckon those people simply prefer not to separate their money, and that by offering them an interest paying current account, they might be willing to switch.
It seems to be having some limited success, given LHV UK deposits have just passed £1 billion.
Very much so.
The BoE website has a section called “Data Viewer” with all sorts of interesting stats. It’s not very user friendly but is worth learning how to use. The banks are required to provide huge quantities of data to BoE on a monthly basis. This is then aggregated and published.
That’s true - startup account only waives the fees for a year after all. There are alternatives, but FreeAgent is a nice perk I guess, especially with MTD expanding in scope to include more people over time.
FWIW this is Ulster PCA (confusingly called Premier) vs RBS Premier. Same mindless design, just a tad darker. The OG black card was one of the most elegant I’ve seen.
It’s a brilliant perk. I was already using and paying £33pm for FreeAgent and have been for years. I now get it free with NatWest, having recently switched from Starling.
I’m getting 2 years of free business banking as part of their switch offer. Unsure if that deal is available to startups though.
I guess it makes sense to test new stuff on the smaller customer bases first, before pushing it out to the main NatWest brand, which I assume has the largest customer base within the group.
So got my Ulster Debit Card and Select account all setup.
I’ve spoken to an agent about upgrading to the Ulster Private Account and they confirmed I can use my Investment Account with Barclays as proof of savings. So they said to do the upgrade and then they will sort everything out.
