Saving Gateway Accounts Bill
4:37 pm
Helen Banks: Yes, of course. The Bill has already taken into account a number of the views that we expressed on the early proposals. It is important to say that we have been working with the Treasury for some time on this. We had some issues with the complexity of matching or maturity payments, for example.
In terms of where we sit now, our members remain concerned about one or two key issues. At the top of the list is transferability and the complexity that it will add to systems developments. The transfer process will probably have to be a manual workaround, and, of course, those are always more costly than automated systems. That angle is slightly complicated by the need to provide the history of an account in order for the new provider to do the maturity calculations at the correct time and to include such information in statements and so on, which would be passed from one provider to another. That is one of our key concerns about complexity.
Other questions remain about the regularity of statements and the information required in them, for example. At the moment, we are talking about a six-monthly statement, which I think is fairly widely accepted. However, if prescription of information required in the statement is particularly onerous, an additional systems build, and therefore more cost, would result. Anything where we have to develop systems comes at a cost, frankly.