Looking Good (Scottish Widows Bank plc)

Member Name: oldreekie

Product:	Scottish Widows Bank plc
Date:	12/03/02 (612 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Convenience of telephone banking, Competitive Interest, Simple to operate

Disadvantages: Some may find lack of other services frustrating, Worrying deterioration in telephone service

Now to look at my profile you could be forgiven for thinking that I spend half my life at the movies, and then spend the other half writing about them on dooyoo!

Well it might surprise you to learn that I have another interest:

Money! The procurement, retention and expansion thereof.

It’s all thanks to my thrifty mother. Of course being a canny Scot, the Art of Thrift comes as second nature to me. However from a very early age my mother instilled in me the benefit of a disciplined approach to saving. No matter how little you earn, you should always, but always, put something away. I practiced this from childhood when some of my Christmas and birthday money would go into an account with the Edinburgh Savings Bank, right through my working career.

Well that was until a couple of years when I moved from being a saver to a spender, big time! Shocked at my new found frivolousness I decided to get back into the savings habit, and after a bit of looking around I found Scottish Widows Bank.


WHO ARE THEY?

Scottish Widows is probably fairly well known to us all through their TV and press adverts currently featuring Amanda Lamb as the black-cloaked Widow, who is “looking good for your money”. Scottish Widows itself was set-up in Edinburgh in 1815 to assist the Scottish orphans and widows of the Napoleonic Wars and has since grown to become one of Britain’s largest Pension Life and Investment providers.

Scottish Widows Bank (hence forth referred to as SWB) was set up in 1995.

Scottish Widows was taken over by Lloyds-TSB Group in 1999, although SWB continues to operate as a separate business from the Lloyds-TSB branch network, offering it’s own products.

Based in Edinburgh, SWB offers a telephone and/or postal banking service. This Edinburgh office of SWB is the only one that they have, there are no regional offices or branches.

The bank is open from 8am
until 9pm, Monday to Friday. There is no weekend service.



WHAT DO THEY OFFER?

Well I’m happy to say that their product range is refreshingly simple. Rather than offer a bewildering array of different products which become obsolete within 6 months, SWB only offer 2 savings account plus a Mini-cash ISA, all of which do exactly what it says on the tin.

INSTANT TRANSFER ACCOUNT – Instant Access to your funds.

&

60 DAY ACCOUNT – 60 Days notice required for withdrawals
Pays a slighlty higher rate of interest.

Other than the above the accounts are identical. The key features of the accounts are:

Can be operated over the telephone or by post
Minimum opening balance and transaction value of £100
Regular monthly contributions can be made, minimum of £25 per month
Interest can be paid monthly, quarterly, half-annually or annually
Statement based
Competitive rates of interest
Only intended for savings, no direct debits or standing orders permitted
No 3rd party deposits permitted, which means you can have your salary paid into the account, for example.


MINI CASH ISA – CAT standard ISA savings account

ISA (Individual Savings Account) is the government approved tax-free savings scheme. In a Mini Cash ISA, you are permitted to deposit a total of £3000 in any one tax year. You can only deposit into one Mini Cash ISA per year. Other than that the terms and conditions are similar to those above except:

Minimum opening balance and transaction value of £25
Regular monthly contributions can be made, minimum of £10 per month


INTEREST

Well here’s a bit that’s gonna date pretty soon! The interest rates on the accounts are tiered, the more you pay in the higher the rate of interest you get. Also, SWB are currently offering a bonus to new customers
of an additional 0.5% above the standard customer rate for the first 6 months the account is open.

So in a Instant Transfer with a balance between £100 - £9999 a new customer will get 4.15%gross (rate for 6 months) the standard customer rate is 3.65%gross.

The same band on the 60 day Account pays 4.20gross/3.70%gross.

All rates and tier bands are on the web-site (see below)


A FEW WORDS ON POSTAL/TELEPHONE BANKING

These accounts are intended purely for saving, they do not offer any of the additional services that you expect from your High Street bank such as cash card, cheque book, standing orders, direct debits, foreign facilities, cheque clearance etc.

All you can do is make deposits and withdrawals and even then in a restricted fashion.

When you open the account you must give SWB details of your existing High Street current account. Your new SWB account operates in conjunction with this account. If you wish to make any withdrawals the funds are sent via the bank clearing system to your nominated account. You cannot request a cheque and you cannot have the funds paid to a 3rd party. Similarly with deposits, these can only be made either by a cheque drawn on your nominated account or by SWB can transfer the funds via the banking system using a direct debit. You cannot pay in funds or cheques from a third party, such as dividend mandates or refund cheques from your electricity supplier.

These conditions do seem a bit restrictive but I found that once I got used to them there was no problem in operating the account.

Which brings me on to…

OLDREEKIE AT SWB

I opened my account about 9 months ago and have been mostly happy with the account and the service. After I first heard about the account, I gave SWB a phone and they sent me out an information pack and an application form. The form was perfectly straight-forward to fill in and a couple of days after I retur
ned it with my cheque to open the account I received a pack welcoming me SWB and details on how to operate the account.

I did experience one problem during my early use of the account however that was down to me not having fully read the account information pack which was sent to me, resulting in me attempting to deposit a 3rd party cheque to the account. I was pretty annoyed at the time however the person I spoke to at SWB was very helpful and fully explained the reason behind the rule (money laundering regulations) which I fully accepted.

Since then I have had no problems…until recently! The quality of the telephone service has deteriorated greatly in the past few months. From getting through within about 30 seconds at the most I have found myself having to hang on for up to 5 minutes at times to get through, which isn’t very reassuring for a telephone bank. I have been assured tho each time I mention this that steps are being taken to improve the telephone service (new staff, more training, etc) and for the time being I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I must admit that when I called last Friday (8th March) to do a bit of last minute research for this op, once I got passed the automated answering service, my call was picked up right away.

Overall, apart from the recent deterioration in call answering times I can’t really fault the service I’ve had and I’m happy with the interest rate I’m receiving. It’s not the best on the market but it’s good and according to The Sunday Times weekend best buys, the account has paid a consistently competitive rate over the past 3 years.


CONTACT INFO

Telephone: 0845 845 0829

Web-site: www.scottishwidows.co.uk

Postal: 67 Morrison Street, Edinburgh, EH3 5ZE

And finally thanks to the very helpful Lesley at SWB for answering all my research questions on Friday!

Summary: