My experience of moving banks

Tweeted about this a few times and people have asked lots of questions… so a blog post is born!
With a saving account at Barclays and a current account with HSBC, recent banking scandals/rate fixing/money laundering had really made me keen to move banks.
I spent a bit of time reading sites like Move Your Money UK (very good) and deciding where I wanted to go, in the end it mostly came down to the Ethical Consumer banking configurator-thingy which allows you to say which values are important to you and suggests an appropriate place for your dosh.
After some more reading/faffing/pondering I settled on Nationwide for my current account for two reasons:
- The main one – they scored well on the index with my chosen values
- The added bonus – they employ quite a few of my friends in Bournemouth – I know it sounds silly, but if I’m going to move banks it’s definitely an added bonus that in some small way it helps keep my friends in jobs!
So, bye bye HSBC + Barclays – hello Nationwide + Credit Union*!
*For my savings, I’m going to go for a local credit union – I’m still researching them at the moment, when I’ve decided I’ll write a follow up post I promise!
Closing my Barclay’s savings account was surprisingly quick and easy, they didn’t offer any resistance (I’d expected a “Are you sure we can’t…” or something!) and was all over in about 5 minutes. I got the feeling, it was quite a common occurrence at Barclays at the moment.
Opening and moving to Nationwide…
I tried to do it online, but the site had an error – as I was heading to Barclays anyway (having found my passport) I thought I’d do it in person.
The lady who served me was very good, it didn’t take very long and they promised to take care of it all for me (transferring direct debits etc) – the only exceptions were that I’d need to update my paypal bank account details, inform my lodger and my employer.
That was it.
My advice:
- Do it. It’s easier/quicker than I expected.
- Do it. It felt good to have some (small) element of control over these banks.
- Take your last 3 months worth of statements with you and they’ll match credit limits/overdrafts limits.
- Do it. If we all moved bank accounts it’d have more effect than voting, whinging, writing to our MPs or anything else we could do short of some sort of full on anti-bank revolution!
- Do it. The total time it’s taken has been at most an hour (once I decided on which bank).
If you have any questions/comments please share them below – I’d love to hear about others moving their money!
I’m going to move as well but I decided against Nationwide because they pay their chief executive £2.2 million (including pension bonus etc) which doesn’t feel very mutual to me. If they say they need to pay that much to compete in ” the marketplace” for financial sector executives then they don’t understand the problem! The Yorkshire Building Society is looking like being my best option, once they start providing current accounts next year.