When is 0.1 percent 'Healthy'? - Bank Insults Again

You couldn’t make it up…

Not content with insulting me over their loan offers recently (see previous blogs), my bank has now compounded the insult by mailshotting me with an offer to take out an instant access savings account, at the ‘healthy rate’ of 0.2% (which apparently includes a ‘bonus’ of 0.1%).  This raises some interesting points:

 1)      If rates go down again later this week (as is widely expected), where do they go – do they charge me for depositing money with them?

2)      How do they manage to convince themselves that a standard rate of 0.1% is ‘healthy’ when they can see that other institutions are offering rates tens of times higher?

3)      Their marketing planning can’t be up to much.  What kind of organisation sends a mailshot out one month offering loans at 19.9%, then mails the same people a month later offering a deposit at 0.1%?  Do they not see how bad that looks?  When I worked at one of their competitors, the programme of offers made to customers was controlled much better than this, in both the volume and frequency of offers made, and their content – to avoid an absurd situation like this – and that was years ago.  I’ve long suspected that we are regressing in this country, and this looks like evidence that backs up my suspicion…

I know ‘times is hard’ as the quote goes, but offering a spread of 19.8% between borrowing and depositing to the same customer is surely pushing it a bit far…or are fings really that bad, guv?