Pesky EU Wants UK Banks Etc To Cut Cross-border Payment Fees

Not content with getting the Brits a better deal on mobile roaming charges and otherwise standing up to BigBusiness, the EU now wants to cut fees for non-Euro cross-border payments and currency conversion. The European Commission is inviting answers to two questionnaires by 30 October 2017 on awareness of the high fees and potential solutions, including whether consumers are being steered toward more costly currency conversion options at check-out.

Of the non-Euro countries in the EU, only Sweden chose to follow Eurozone countries by ensuring its banks and other payment service providers charge the same for cross-border and domestic funds transfers involving Swedish Krona. The other non-Euro countries have allowed "very high" charges for non-Euro cross-border transfers. 

The Commission wants to cut those charges and help consumers choose the best conversion rate when offered the chance to pay in a different currency at check-out.  

Remittance costs must also come down to less than 3% to meet UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The Commission's first step is collecting the views of consumers and industry experts on awareness of high fees and potential solutions. It also wants to know whether consumers are being steered toward more costly currency conversion options at check-out; and how long it might take for real-time exchange rates and price quotes to be introduced.

"British consumers are very pleased to be ripped off when making payments abroad, and are jolly well thankful that our banks and other financial institutions are free to make as much money as possible at their expense. They can't wait to be rid of all this EU meddling in our affairs," a Tory spokesperson probably said.

"Fee Banking", Not "Free Banking": The Shameful Overdraft Saga Continues

Readers will recall that UK retail banks are self-regulated when it comes to overdrafts. They lost control of deposits, savings and payments in 2009, but kept control of lending (bizarrely, given the over-extension of credit in the lead up to the crash). They continued to battle savagely against the OFT's attempt to assess the 'fairness' of their overdraft charges for many years before finally offering to charge a bit less in late 2009. By 2013, however, the banks felt the heat was off, and were congratulating themselves on having found "no breaches" of their own Lending Code. Yet in 2014, the FCA found that "overdraft prices were high, complex, confusing and poorly understood". Now a new report reveals:

"Not only are unarranged overdrafts expensive, but in many cases they cost significantly more than [payday] loans. Many consumers are also unaware either that they have used an unarranged overdraft or of the cost implications even if they do."

The FCA's latest analysis suggests there are about 42m current accounts, about 27% of which are in arranged overdraft for 1 to 12 months (staying within a pre-set credit limit) while 10% operate as unarranged overdrafts for 1 to 12 months (no right to be overdrawn at all or in breach of the credit limit). The FCA's analysis "shows that a quarter of people that used unarranged overdrafts used them in four or more months during 2016. Nearly 10% of unarranged overdraft consumers used them for 10 or more months."

The banks' Lending Code does not require a creditworthiness assessment, yet the FCA found that "overdraft users typically have lower credit scores than consumers with current accounts... [and] consumers using unarranged overdrafts have noticeably lower credit scores than the overall population of current account and overdraft users." The FCA adds that it is "concerned that consumers who repeatedly using unarranged overdrafts are being given access to a service that seems unsuitable for them, and which may be contributing to potential financial distress."

This sounds like a clarion call to the claims management industry 

to switch from seeking refunds of PPI premiums

to seeking refunds of unagreed overdraft charges.

No doubt the banks will continue to resist interference with their dastardly overdraft arrangements, claiming that it would mean the end of "free-banking" (which industry insiders refer to as "fee banking" because banks rely on fees arising from the mismatch between actual customer needs and poorly aligned/understood products).

Banks claim that overdrafts are a feature of current accounts, so the FCA should wait to see how the recent attack on those by the competition regulator pans out before taking further action.

But, as the figures show, not all current accounts come with an overdraft, although my sense is that overdrafts are actually a side-effect of shortcomings in banks' legacy technology - the systems can't maintain real time balances, so the bank has no way of knowing the actual account balance or whether an overdraft limit will be breached when each transaction comes through. But that's the banks' problem.  Overdrafts do constitute a form of "credit", whether they are "arranged"  or "unarranged" and the fact they are still self-regulated as 'lending' speaks volumes (current accounts are regulated as "payment accounts" under the Payment Services Regulations).

Lloyds has already lost its nerve, however, and moved to a new charging structure that the FCA says "does not allow a consumer to use unarranged facilities and does not charge a daily fee if they do."

The banks certainly have plenty of cause for alarm. 

In 2014, the FCA took over regulation of the comparatively tiny 'payday lending' market - 1.6m customers borrowing £3bn at its peak in 2013 - and imposed rules that reduced volumes by 42%. But in this case, the FCA is sounding the death knell of unarranged overdrafts entirely:

"Based on the evidence we have to date, we believe there is a case to consider fundamental reform of unarranged overdrafts and consider whether they should have a place in any modern banking market."