Egg acts over 'risky' customers, (RISKY, yeah right !)

scorza said:
US banks treat their customers like absolute crap :mad:
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That sounds like as much a generalisation as anyone else is making. Though in citi's case arguing that point would set me up for a dose of failboat, so I won't.

Even pre-Citi Egg's service hadn't been up to much (I won't say customer service because actually their UK staff have been OK with me), but I too should have closed accounts some time ago. I'm taking advantage of a low-APR deal right now, and when that's up, I'm outta there (except for my £4 to keep Egg Money Manager working).
 
As I thought, people are not taking this lying down,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7224268.stm


"people who insist they have good records have been contacting the BBC to say they are on the list"

"A Labour MP is asking the banking industry watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, to investigate.

Nigel Griffiths, a former deputy leader of the House of Commons, said Egg's action was "unacceptable"."

A spokesman from the bank,

"We can certainly understand the concerns, but even if people are up-to-date with repayments, they are people we decided we no longer wish to lend money to regardless of their status."

seems a little strange to me, at first they are saying they are getting rid of high risk customers now they are saying regardless of their status they no longer wish to lend them money, somethings not adding up, I'll be interested in what the Financial Services Authority have to say about this, either way Egg are dealing with this very poorly, their certainly not going to come out of this smelling of roses.
 
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I personally dont care that much that they are withdrawing the card, i didnt use it anyway, it was for emergencies, they way they went about it is disgraceful though.
 
lowrider007 said:
As I thought, people are not taking this lying down,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7224268.stm


"people who insist they have good records have been contacting the BBC to say they are on the list"

"A Labour MP is asking the banking industry watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, to investigate.

Nigel Griffiths, a former deputy leader of the House of Commons, said Egg's action was "unacceptable"."

A spokesman from the bank,

"We can certainly understand the concerns, but even if people are up-to-date with repayments, they are people we decided we no longer wish to lend money to regardless of their status."

seems a little strange to me, at first they are saying they are getting rid of high risk customers now they are saying regardless of their status they no longer wish to lend them money, somethings not adding up, I'll be interested in what the Financial Services Authority have to say about this, either way Egg are dealing with this very poorly, their certainly not going to come out of this smelling of roses.
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Seems to me they should have been honest, and simply issued the second statement, rather than the first which claimed it was about credit risk.

The bank is free to deal with whoever they want, and free to stop dealing with any of their customers if they choose, but they should be honest and upfront about the reasons why.
 
I cancelled my egg card in January, before any of this came about.

It was such a good card when it came about. Low APR. Annual fee-free balance transfer and now look at it. Even the cute hamster ads couldn't save it.

Who cares if they drop you. You should not show loyalty to any credit card. There's money to be made in taking cards and then cancelling them with promotions such as quidco. Barclay card gave me £25. Goldfish gave me £41.
 
!bluetonic! said:
And what companies tell the truth these days?

They're their to make money. If this is the way they see fit, move on.
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:D you think we should just roll over and accept it when they screw over their most reliable customers and lie about their reasons for dropping them? :rolleyes:
 
Metalface Mark said:
the way they went about it is disgraceful though.
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What else you do expect, they're part of Citigroup, who are in essence no much better than RBS, HSBC et al.

All it boils down to is getting rid of people they can't exploit.

If you're daft enough to have got yourself in some serious debt and are struggling along on minimum payments they'll keep you on as they can make money from you, plus the increased chance of creating new debt from your precarious situation.

If you're financially sound, they'll discard you as there's a marginal amount of money to be made from you relative to the first example.

They can dress it up as much as they want but that's the top and bottom of it.

Oh and big chuckles with the FSA looking into it - they showed how adept they are with their fantastic handling of the Northern Rock debacle.
 
It's likely that Egg are only the first of many companies that'll do this, although others will use more cunning tactics now they've seen how badly this has reflected on Egg.

Simply put Egg are stopping (not closing) the CC accounts of people - so you can't spend more, from my understanding you don't have to pay it all back and you still have the card, but from now on all you can do is pay money back.

This is purely to reduce bad debt, lower the number of accounts that the company isn't making a profit (or large enough profit) on. If you're hardly using your card then frankly they'll be making very little, or even making a loss on your CC account. It costs money to keep these open, they send you statements etc, by not having the accounts open and getting money back from the ones they've earmarked as "bad debt" the company will make a greater profit and have less debt out there with non-profitable consumers.

It's business, pure and simply. You're allowed to close the account whenever you like, I can't see why a company can't. Every loan I've had, every CC and even my mortgage contract had this clause in it.
 
I have been an Egg customer for cira 7 / 8 years, I have several cards including platinum and amex cards - however at the time Egg were the first to have a real online statement that actually allowed you to manage your money, hence they became my main card.

As someone lucky enought to travel a lot through work I generally spend a 4 figure sum each month which is always paid in full.

The letter I have recieved is an insult, both to myself but also to my intellignce.

I also have a 5 figure sum of money in an Egg savings account, haswnt to say that this will move to a more customer freindly bank tommorow.

The rest of the banking world has caught up witgh the internet now and as such Egg no longer have the competative edge (and the reason they won my busness) any more, infact they have been left behind on that score.
 
I like how everyone is saying that Egg is issuing "false" reasons for dropping customers.

Egg are a business. Like every other business, they are free to evaulate risks to their business in any way that they want. If I was a shopkeeper and decided that people who spend less than £10 in my shop were a risk to my business, that's my perogative. Just because you don't agree with it, doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to make that evaluation and subsequently act on it.

It's the same here. Morally, I suppose it'd be nice if all businesses told the absolute truth about why they do certain things, but in reality that's never going to happen for many reasons. Egg could genuinely believe that people who have good credit ratings are a risk to their business. You might disagree, but that doesn't mean that Egg are wrong to do that.

As Dolph said: they're a business, they can do business with whoever they want, and if they want to stop dealing with someone, they're not obliged to provide an honest, or indeed any reason for doing so. If you don't like the manner in which they deal with people, you don't have to deal with them. If enough people did that, Egg would soon see that their conduct has caused a measurable loss in business which, to them, will either be acceptable, or not.
 
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You do realise that no business wants to damage its' reputation and this sort of thing can in fact be harmful to a company, right?

This decision wasn't thought through properly, the PR guys must be tearing their hair out trying to make this look good.
 
growse said:
I like how everyone is saying that Egg is issuing "false" reasons for dropping customers.

Egg are a business. Like every other business, they are free to evaulate risks to their business in any way that they want. If I was a shopkeeper and decided that people who spend less than £10 in my shop were a risk to my business, that's my perogative. Just because you don't agree with it, doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to make that evaluation and subsequently act on it.

It's the same here. Morally, I suppose it'd be nice if all businesses told the absolute truth about why they do certain things, but in reality that's never going to happen for many reasons. Egg could genuinely believe that people who have good credit ratings are a risk to their business. You might disagree, but that doesn't mean that Egg are wrong to do that.

As Dolph said: they're a business, they can do business with whoever they want, and if they want to stop dealing with someone, they're not obliged to provide an honest, or indeed any reason for doing so. If you don't like the manner in which they deal with people, you don't have to deal with them. If enough people did that, Egg would soon see that their conduct has caused a measurable loss in business which, to them, will either be acceptable, or not.
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You are quite unbelievable actually - your logic is flawed or you have trouble comprehending what Egg have actually said and done.
 
dilated said:
As someone lucky enought to travel a lot through work I generally spend a 4 figure sum each month which is always paid in full.
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Though I'm sure you're covered on expenses, you might want to have a look at the Post Office credit card - 0% commission. I can't remember if Nationwide offer the same.
 
Richdog said:
You do realise that no business wants to damage its' reputation and this sort of thing can in fact be harmful to a company, right?

This decision wasn't thought through properly, the PR guys must be tearing their hair out trying to make this look good.
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This may be true. They may have made a *huge* miscalculation on this one. But it doesn't meant that they shouldn't be allowed to do it. They could post a press release tomorrow saying "we hate all our customers".

dirtydog said:
You are quite unbelievable actually - your logic is flawed or you have trouble comprehending what Egg have actually said and done.
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Way to go on elaboration! Seriously, Egg have said they don't want to do business with people who don't make them any profit. Or have they suddenly denied the holocaust?
 
growse said:
Way to go on elaboration! Seriously, Egg have said they don't want to do business with people who don't make them any profit. Or have they suddenly denied the holocaust?
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does them declaring you a risky customer affect your credit rating/ability to get credit elsewhere? because if it does then that's quite a big problem.
 
Tefal said:
does them declaring you a risky customer affect your credit rating/ability to get credit elsewhere? because if it does then that's quite a big problem.
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No. That would be illegal.

Your credit history is just that, a history. A record of what credit you've taken, and when you've missed payments. A company can't just "decide" that you're a credit risk and put that in your credit file. A company can however decide that you're a credit risk and stop doing business with you. No other bank or financial institution should ever know the reason why you ceased becoming an Egg customer. If Egg cancelled your account because you repeatedly failed to pay them lots of money, then that would be on your credit history as lots of failed payments, which would then deter other institutions from giving you credit.
 
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CF93 said:
So how long will it be till savers are told...your savings account is being closed cause it's costing us too much in interest to you cause your balance is too large???
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Never because they are making more money on your savings than they are paying back in interest. Otherwise there wouldn't be any savings accounts.
 
Nothing wrong with this really as they are simply declining to lend money to certain people anymore. Any existing debts will continue as before, you just can't add to them.

Perhaps not handled that well from a PR perspective I suppose (trying to pass it off as a purge of 'bad' debtors), but at the end of the day for those affected it shouldn't be hard to get another card I'd imagine (no doubt with a juicy introductory interest free period to boot).
 
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