Current accounts least popular
Monday, 07 November 2005 12:00
Current accounts make more people unhappy than any other financial product, a new study finds.
Overall, 1.9 million UK residents feel antipathy to their current account, a report by MoneyExpert.com finds, almost twice as many as are unhappy with their credit cards - the next least popular product.
"We were surprised at the level of dissatisfaction, which is pretty high according to the research," said Sean Gardner, MoneyExpert chief executive.
"Further evidence of this growing unrest with financial services products is evidenced by the increase in complaints received by the Financial Ombudsman Service. To the year ending March 2005 it saw an increase of 12 per cent, to more than 614,000. This followed a 19 per cent rise in 2004."
After credit cards and current accounts, savings accounts were the next least popular product - with about 700,000 people unimpressed - followed by mortgages (500,000 people) and personal loans (300,000).
"We believe one of the main reasons for this growth is many people are choosing products on rate alone and are not giving enough consideration to product features or are not researching providers as well as they could.
"Taking out a financial product is, in effect, beginning a relationship, sometimes lasting many years. We would encourage people to think carefully what their priorities are in a product and what they would expect from the lender.
"The moral of the tale is: know who you're dealing with and assess where their priorities lie. Sometimes (but not always) the price of offering great customer service is being unable to offer the best product rates."
But not everybody is unhappy with their providers, with online and telephone bank First Direct coming top of the satisfaction league.
A massive 93 per cent of First Direct account holders were satisfied with their products. The next most contented customers belonged to Britannia Building Society (90 per cent contentment), with Nationwide, Tesco Personal Finance, and the Co-operative Bank tied in third place and all having 89 per cent of their customers happy.
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