Some of the UK’s biggest banks have been failing their most vulnerable customers, according to the financial regulator.<\/p>\n
Banks have been pushing homeless people or those in financial hardship towards unsuitable online applications and away from basic bank accounts.<\/p>\n
These accounts are free, do not include an overdraft facility, and provide essential banking for those unable to open a mainstream account.<\/p>\n
Now, the nine UK banks and building societies which operate basic bank accounts have agreed to demands from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to make access more straightforward.<\/p>\n
Basic bank accounts have many of the same functions as a regular current account, but are designed for those who might otherwise be excluded from the banking system. More than four million people in the UK have these accounts.<\/p>\n
They are offered by Barclays, The Co-operative Bank, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group (including the Halifax and Bank of Scotland brands), Nationwide Building Society, NatWest (including the RBS and Ulster Bank brands), Santander, TSB and Virgin Money.<\/p>\n
Features include:<\/p>\n
accepting payments such as wages and benefits, and allowing account-holders to make payments through debit cards, direct debits and standing orders<\/p>\n
free, but with no overdraft facility<\/p>\n
available to those who have a bad credit history, are bankrupt or have an official debt recovery plan<\/p>\n
some access for homeless people, by working with charities to confirm someone’s identity<\/p>\n
But a mystery shopping exercise by the FCA rated a third of experiences with basic bank accounts as poor or very poor.<\/p>\n
The exercise covered 298 interactions across branches and by telephone, and rated 28% of cases as good or very good, 38% as fair, 20% as poor and 14% as very poor.<\/p>\n
Problems included failing to offer these accounts to people who needed them, particularly those with no fixed address. <\/p>\n
Some pushed customers in vulnerable circumstances towards online applications to open an account unsuitable for their needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some of the UK’s biggest banks have been failing their most vulnerable customers, according to the financial regulator.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":677699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-677698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=677698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/677699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=677698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=677698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=677698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}