Are you using your credit card properly – or should that be profitably?
After a year of bumper profits and illegal penalty charges, you could be forgiven for thinking that banks couldn’t stoop any lower. Wrong! One of our leading high street names has now sunk to even lower depths.
Lloyds TSB has recently slapped some of its ‘naughtier’ customers with a “low usage fee”. They will now have to pay a penalty of £35 if they don’t regularly use their card. The bank reckons the fee will affect only about 1% of its customers, but it could still generate revenue of £1.79 million in one month alone, according to figures by Uswitch.
It’s astonishing, isn’t it? Lloyds TSB recently announced profits of more than £4 billion, yet still it hits customers with sneaky charges. It’s also a bank that has bleated about bad debts, yet still it seems happy to encourage people to borrow on their credit card.
