Saving Gateway Accounts Bill
10:45 am
Teresa Perchard: You are right to identify the risk that a customer who is dealing with a fairly large financial institution may receive a lot of offers of other products and services, as a result of opening a savings gateway account. Certainly, in our experience of promoting the take-up of basic bank accounts, which are very safe and cannot be overdrawn—all the all the banks have been offering them—we have come across many cases where people, perhaps people with learning disabilities or with income from benefits, who we advised to look for one of those accounts, have gone into a branch and come away with a full-service account and a credit card with a limit of £2,500. Their parents just shook their heads in horror.
It is very difficult to get large, very impersonal financial services providers to deal with people as individuals. The protection from over-marketing to that group is not in the Bill or in any of the regulations, as far as I am aware. The Government will have to forge with the providers an understanding of how that group of customers will be treated, so that although they are included and not treated as charity cases and have the experience of being mainstream, well-respected customers whose custom is wanted, they are not taken advantage of at the same time if they lack experience. That will be difficult to achieve, but if we can get providers competing to attract such business, they should do so on the basis that they treat those customers properly. They should be trusted providers, not any old provider who walks up and says that they will do it, but I am not sure how you can regulate for that—unless you can take away the right to run these accounts from providers who behave badly in some way. I am not sure whether there is a fall-back to be able to do that.