Foreign Perspectives

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

French banking practices are very different from those in the UK in several key areas and it’s those differences that we’ll concentrate on here.

Conseilleurs

In the UK, a bank advisor is there to do things like advise you what to invest your money in and to sell you insurance but in France Conseilleurs don’t do anything as complex as that and are required to do really simple stuff like changing a direct debit or opening a savings account. This wouldn’t be so bad but you always need to make an appointment to see “your” advisor because, for reasons which escape me, the others that may be there on the day you go in can’t do that kind of simple task for you. Of course, this approach means that each advisor is clogged up with work at the trivial end of the scale. If you want to open a savings account in the UK, you fill in a form, hand in ID and cash and the cashier opens it there and then. Here it can take several weeks to open even the simplest account. So, ’tis best to develop a relationship with your advisor here as you’ll be making untold numbers of appointments to see them.In the UK, a bank advisor is there to do things like advise you what to invest your money in and to sell you insurance but in France Conseilleurs don’t do anything as complex as that and are required to do really simple stuff like changing a direct debit or opening a savings account. This wouldn’t be so bad but you always need to make an appointment to see “your” advisor because, for reasons which escape me, the others that may be there on the day you go in can’t do that kind of simple task for you. Of course, this approach means that each advisor is clogged up with work at the trivial end of the scale. If you want to open a savings account in the UK, you fill in a form, hand in ID and cash and the cashier opens it there and then. Here it can take several weeks to open even the simplest account. So, ’tis best to develop a relationship with your advisor here as you’ll be making untold numbers of appointments to see them.

Overdrafts in the UK are “permanent” in that there is no problem in running an account that is constantly in the red. In France, you can only be overdrawn for 10 days per month and for the rest of the month the account must be in credit. That said, you can get a permanent overdraft facility from some of the proper banks. They all seem to implement this by giving you a credit card which is linked to your current account; when you are overdrawn outside the 10 day limit an automatic cash advance from this card takes you back into credit. French banks don’t charge cash advance fees so in practical terms this gives you something that works very like a UK overdraft.

Debit cards come in two basic varieties: immediate debit or deferred debit. Immediate debit operates just like a UK debit card ie purchases are charged to your account right away. With deferred debit, your purchases are charged to your account at the end of the month. In both cases there is a spending limit of around EUR 3000 per month and a withdrawal limit of EUR 300 per week.

Credit cards are quite rare in France at the moment but operate much the same as in the UK with the exceptions that there is no cash advance fee and they charge per transaction for all international purchases. Interest rates are generally higher than in the UK too. The other difference is that the amount you repay per month isn’t a set percentage but goes in bands eg EUR 15 or EUR 30 per month.

Store cards are available but usually require proof of your French income so can’t be obtained until a year or two after you get here. The one exception that we’ve found is Auchan which offers you it’s store card about a year after you sign up for it’s loyalty card and doesn’t require anything beyond a passport.

Popularity: 22% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Barclays Bank bought the Woolwich Building Society around seven years ago but really did very little to integrate the two outfits until now. In fact, the only visible changes to date is that the Woolwich stopped issuing credit cards under its own name and various documents started having “a trading name of Barclays Bank” or words to that effect added to them.

The original reason put forward for their purchase was to acquire the technology that Woolwich used to implement its excellent Open Plan account, an account that let you offset any savings that you have against your mortgage. Not really a great move on the whole as the Woolwich technology was extremely primitive even then and, though operational, did silly things like charge you interest when you wrote a cheque against money that you actually had in a linked savings account and then refunding that the following month.

In due course, Barclays ran up a version for themselves and improved the offering from the Woolwich.

However, now they’re finally getting around to fully integrating the Woolwich into Barclays so all existing Woolwich accounts will disappear and be replaced by the corresponding Barclays ones. Snag is, that the Woolwich offered a number of quite sophisticated savings accounts and Barclays only has very simple ones.

Naturally, Barclays is putting this across as a series of “improvements”. They list 10, so let’s look at each one:

1. You’ll have over 30,000 staff waiting to help you including many who are presently serving customers in the Woolwich.

So, you’ll have Barclays staff to look to. OK, more people, so let’s count that as a real improvement 

2. You can use any of the 1,700 or so Barclays branches in the country and any Barclays Hole in the Wall„¢ machines.

Em, you already can so that’s hardly an improvement.

3. You’ll have access to Barclays telephone and online banking*, so it’s easy to manage your money when our branches are closed.

Woolwich already have phone and online banking, so that’s not an improvement.

4. You can get the same tailored service you expect from your Woolwich branch, only more so you can book an appointment with one of our Personal Bankers. And our specialists will help to make sure that all your financial needs are covered.

Actually, you’ve been able to do that for around seven years now.

5. You can choose anything from a wide range of Barclays products and specialist services.

You’ve always been able to do that.

6. You can also arrange your foreign currency and International Money Orders at any Barclays branch, at our Bureaux de Change or by calling the Barclays Travel Line on 0845 600 8090**.

You’ve always been able to do that, though hardly a recommendation given their charges.

7. You will also have peace of mind of knowing that your money remains safe with us. For instance, we offer free security software to active online customers€ .

OK, we’ll give them that one.

8. Barclays has a broader range of products and services so we can help you with your business finances as well as your personal ones.

Actually, it offers a narrower range of products though it does do business finance so let’s count that as a plus.

9. We also do more in the community. Spaces for Sports is just one example we’re investing over £30 million in helping communities to transform their sporting facilities in the UK.

Well, if memory serves, the Woolwich was pretty active in supporting local communities before it was taken over.

10. The same friendly staff will be there, helping us to stay one of the top 20 big companies in Britain to work for.

So, no change is counted as an advantage of the change?

However, what about the accounts that are changing. In fact, almost every single one is being downgraded.

Cardsaver

A very popular account which offers a Visa Electron debit card and pays quite good interest.

This becomes a savings account which offers (on request) a card which will only work in Barclays machines in the UK. Moreover, it will no longer be possible to get counter cheques so if you want to withdraw more than the cash machine limit (reduced from £400 to £300), you’ll need to open a Barclays current account. Oh, and you can’t make deposits in the ATMs any more.

So, this account has been “improved” by removing nearly all the facilities from it for which people selected it.

Open Plan for Savers

I suspect that the Barclays people have completely forgotten about this account.

This was even better in some ways as the Cardsaver account. It gave you on a savings account, a chequebook and full Visa debit card plus the ability to setup up to 12 separate savings accounts within it, each of which could have individual standing orders and direct debits against them.

This becomes a standard savings account which offers (on request) a cash card which will only work in Barclays machines and, again, a reduced limit of £300 per day. Of course, you can’t make deposits in the ATMs either.

If I’m right that they have forgotten about this account, it will cause chaos for those people who have it. All of a sudden their direct debits won’t get paid for a start. If they have remembered about it, I’d say that it could be rather a difficult account to map onto the Barclays range as it offers the equivalent to having up to 12 separate current accounts.

Almost all of the downsides arise from the fact that Woolwich was basically a savings institution when it was taken over whereas Barclays is a commercial bank. The effect of this is that the Woolwich had a much more sophisticated range of savings accounts and it would have been far simpler had Barclays adopted these rather than downgrading the accounts across the board.

After all, when the Halifax bought the Bank of Scotland, the accounts available to everyone in both institutions really did improve. But then, the Halifax was the savings institution and well aware that peoples’ savings needs aren’t met well by the offerings of banks. The Halifax/Bank of Scotland now offers everything that was on offer by both parties and indeed many products have been significantly improved by the takeover.

Barclays is in the process of taking a great step backwards in its offerings.

Popularity: 5% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Almost all of the press coverage that you see is of the view that global warming is a “bad thing” and we should be getting the finger out to stop it happening. But, is it?

This is a painting by Hondius in 1684 of one of the regular Frost Fairs taking place on the Thames. In fact both the Thames and the Baltic Sea froze over quite regularly in the 1600s.

That was prior to the industrial revolution of course and combined with a much lower population, pollution at that time was considerably less than it would have been 150 or so years later. The “Black Country” wasn’t named that for nothing as it was filled with major league polluters during the industrial revolution.

Did the industrial revolution stop us getting into another ice age? Nobody can really say as there are just too many variables in the equation: you’ve everything from the industrial revolution raising pollution levels considerably to sunspot cycles and to top it all the records over the period simply weren’t accurate or complete enough to really give a definitive answer.

What if the alternative to global warming were global cooling? Would that be a “good thing”?

Popularity: 3% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!