OneGuyFromBarlick

Not only are the Banks "Out to get You" the Insurance companies are also getting in on the act. My recent repeat cover on my car was in my mind a little over the top. A search for alternative cover through the internet, although cheaper, didn't give me a warm feeling. Finally, a search back to original provider gave me a quote that was £150 cheaper for exactly the same cover as the paper quote.
Why do they treat regular customers with known track records in such a shabby cavalier way while at the same time ready to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry on preferred terms.

Two years ago I followed your path on car insurance, the internet and comparison web sites threw up quotes much cheaper. Deeper research brought up some facts like a maximum no claims of 5 years so my present 16 years was not taken into account and should I make a claim it would reduce to two years. This would seriously reduce my options on changing companys in the future. So in the end I renewed through a different broker with the same company I had been with for years and got a new customer bonus reduction of £120.00 less than my renewal Quote. This year I did the same with my AA Cover and saved £40.00 over my standard renewal. Pays to not auto renew.

Most of the big conglomerates are the same. I dumped Sky about 18 months ago and ever since I have had a tirade of better and better offers to return to the fold, both by mail and telephone. I have pointed out that if as an existing customer they had reduced my prices to what new customers get I would have stayed with them. I have also told them that I will go back to them if they match what I am paying for my TV now with my Freesat box, they normally leave me alone for a bit when I ask for a zero tariff.

My ex car insurance company tried it on as well, with a quote of over £800.00 to renew. Rang them and asked them to knock £600.00 off but you would have though I was talking a foreign language to them. I have been driving for 40 years and have 20 years NCD. Shopping around found me an equivalent deal via the Meerkats, a follow up telephone call to the company got me another £20.00 knocked off and my comprehensive policy with all the bits I wanted and none of the niceties I don't for £180.00, about right I reckon. I wonder how many just pay the first price asked at renewal?

I've simplified my life to the point where I only have one insurance policy, house contents. I do this through a broker at Burnley and have never had any reason to complain. They occasionally change my provider if there is a cheaper one on offer. All right, I pay them for doing it but never have to worry about it...
You're right Ian. all the large companies and banks now see us as cash cows, not clients.

plaques wrote:Why do they treat regular customers with known track records in such a shabby cavalier way while at the same time ready to accept any Tom, Dick or Harry on preferred terms.

It's just normal and accepted business practice now, Plaques. They justify it (in their little world) by claiming they need to bring in more new customers to keep down your premiums! Haha! But it's really the cynical exploitation of customer loyalty.

I hope you all heard Paul Lewis warning us of HSBC's latest arrogant trick to hang on to people's money? If you go into the bank and ask to take out £1000 from your account they've been demanding that you tell them what you want it for. If they don't like it, or you won't tell them, they won't let you have the money. Your money! It's been happening to lots of people and even someone who wanted as little as £500 was interrogated about it. Paul Lewis investigated and exposed the practice and now HSBC have agreed to stop doing it. Well done Paul! It's just one more example of the arrogant banking execs in their ivory towers sending out edicts to the branches, forcing them to do what most of the counter staff realise is very, very inappropriate.

Never had any bother when i borrowed 3,000,000 of them.

Many years ago I had occasion to transfer £17,000 to Croft House in Station Road. I warned the bank I wanted it in notes and took a carrier bag for it. They couldn't understand why I didn't do a transfer and at first objected but I told them it was my money and I'd never actually seen it in one lump! In the end they agreed and I had the pleasure of watching it being counted twice, once by them and once at the building society! Well worth it, the only time I've ever seen my assets stacked up!

hartley353 wrote:Never had any bother when i borrowed 3,000,000 of them.

Thought I ought to expand on this one, you guys might not get my sense of Humour. The above sum was in Japanese yen and probably at the time was little more than stanley had in his carrier bag.

I remember drawing out £300 in cash from the Yorkshire Bank for the deposit on our first house. Thought I was going to get mugged on the journey from the bottom of Newtown to the top up to Walkers solicitors. Most money I had ever had in my pocket at the time. Years later when running my business had no problem walking in with £28,000 when a good job paid out, most of it not mine but a nice feeling.

Money is dirty stuff. I once guarded a delivery of used BAFV notes to the incinerator in Hanover. The stink in the safe where they held the money before burning was unbelievable!

Within my coin collection there are a few notes, some of these are Armed forces notes in various low denominations. At one time they were very collectable and quite valuable till a few trunks of unissued notes were discovered a short while ago.

See this LINK for a report about Lloyd's Bank raising the contingency for PPI mis-selling another 31.8billion to almost £10billion. This brings the total for all banks to almost £20billion. Robert Peston raised the interesting view that this will be a boost for the spending power in the economy equivalent to 1.5% of GDP. Talk about there always being a silver lining!

Robert Peston, on the BBC web site yesterday
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-26058651
Who isn’t probing banks’ alleged currency rigging?
New York's Department of Financial Services is very much the late arrival to the worldwide investigation into whether up to 15 huge global banks manipulated the foreign exchange market. But its request for documents from banks will disturb them, because it has a reputation for being particularly aggressive - as the UK bank Standard Chartered found to its cost when the Department of Financial Services pursued it for breaches of money laundering rules. A dizzying number of regulators are looking at this latest alleged scandal, including the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK, the Department of Justice, the New York Fed, the Office of the Controller of the Currency and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, all in the US, Bafin in Germany and Finma in Switzerland. I am told that the competition authorities in Brussels are also thinking about getting involved.

In the UK, RBS, Lloyds and Barclays are all reviewing thousands and thousands of emails and instant messages sent by their currency traders, to assess whether they attempted to rig prices. It is looking very messy and expensive for the big banks - with Martin Wheatley, the chief executive of the FCA, having told MPs yesterday that the allegations against them are every bit as bad as their abuses of the Libor interest-rate market. Which implies that as and when the investigations conclude, probably next year, fines and penalties could run to billions of pounds.
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...and elsewhere:
Loans guarantee? It's to protect banks NOT you, bosses warned as fears of new mis-selling scandal rise
Fears are rising of a new bank mis-selling scandal, with hundreds of small businesses owners signing up to loans under a Government-backed scheme wrongly believing it protects them against losses if their company fails.
Full story here:
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/smal ... -rise.html

My problem is the fact that when they catch them they don't cuff 'em! See PE for the number of bankers who ran the scams now in charge of the regulatory authorities in government. It would be a far stronger message if they were doing time..... It's the modern version of the 'big lie', too guilty to charge because if they were gaoled the top ranks in the City would be decimated. 'Too big to prosecute'?

News in The Times that Amazon is blatantly breaking the law by ignoring the Sale of Goods Act. Under the Act it should replace or repair, free of charge, any goods that fail within the lifetime that a customer would reasonably expect but instead it's demanding that customers pay a charge to have a replacement - and even then they've been sending out refurbished goods instead of new as replacements. We've got to a point where large organisations believe the law doesn't have to apply to them. It's not political tyrants we have to worry about now but commercial tyrants!

Due to value for money prices I have always used amazon, any difficulties with failed products have been dealt with swiftly and to my satisfaction what they are doing on products where folks have had many years use is probably an industry standard and will apply to most new for old insurance policies. The word is betterment you shouldn't gain by a failure.

So why bother having legal standards of service?

But the customers should not be charged for a replacement. And the Amazon issue has shown up particularly with Kindle devices and the replacements they have given (or sold, to be more correct) have also been failing early, probably because they are only refurbished returns that have seen better days.

When you buy an item that you could reasonably expect to last say 5 years and it fails after 3.5 you would have a justifiable case for replacement. If you got a replacement cost free then it would mean if the replacement lasted the 5 years you would have had service for 8.5 years for the cost of 5 years, this is betterment. All standards of trading are upheld their is no fiddling. Kindles was a bad example they were never value for money and rushed to the market with known faults. I am still not ready to purchase one yet.

I'm afraid you've missed the point. The legal definition would be that you have been sold goods that were not fit for purpose. That is the simple basis for all claims for early failure, no complications about how long it worked for.
See this LINK for the efficient way Barclays look after customer's confidential details.

The CAB has an excellent web page on this matter, there is no defined process with any clarity for goods which are deemed to have been accepted. This is where goods have performed exactly as would have been expected from the date of purchase for a reasonable length of time, with out the purchaser having logged a complaint.

See this LINK for news that RBS is considering getting out of investment banking which will mean 30,000 jobs going in the next 3 to 5 years.

Could we be looking at another LIBOR type rate fixing scandal but on a bigger scale? Have a look at this LINK for a report on Mark Carny's appearance in front of the Treasury Committee today.

It looks like meltdown time at Co-op Bank, with the new boss throwing his toys out of the pram because his £3 million salary package was leaked to the news media. It could mean even less choice of banks on the High Street and even more scepticism of `ethical' companies.

I see that Mr Sutherland of the Co-Op bank has now resigned. What else did he expect to happen. No organisation can tolerate people holding them to ransom. What amazes me is the number of "managers" who think they are totally exempt from replacement. Yet common sense must tell them that within any organisation of any size managers are being replaced virtually on a daily basis. Perhaps they start to believe their own propaganda.