Personal Banking

Why banking has changed in your favour, and being a customer can yield dividends.

These days personal banking is about choices- where to save, invest, borrow, or indeed where simply to put your monthly income. Even if you do nothing but pay in your salary, there is a massive differential in interest rates between best and worst performing banks (3000%- yes 3000%!). So shop around and you’ll save, or earn, a tidy sum.

Historically, personal banking meant having a bank account into which you put your salary, and an occasional visit to a mortgage lender (usually a different company) to keep your house on track. The banks were in the high street, and never competed very much for business. You also received little respect for your custom. Competition was stagnant to say the least.

Welcome, however, to a brave new world of personal banking; where a far larger number of companies are only too glad to compete for your business- and for a much bigger range of products. Today you probably have a credit card; you might want a loan for a car, and we all have far higher personal incomes; which means we want savings accounts and investments too. We bank on the high street, the internet, and by phone; and we use different companies for different jobs- you might borrow with a different company than the one you have a bank account with.

So the ethos of clever personal banking is to shop around- and never take “No” as the final answer- if you can’t get the savings, mortgage, credit card or insurance deal you want, chances are someone else can offer it to you. Despite this advice, 60% of people bank with the same company their whole life through, so get online and do some grafting- it could save you huge amounts of money for very little effort. You’re a customer now, not an inconvenience, and companies are hungry for your business.