Are you baffled by your bank’s T&Cs?

Yes I’ve read my banks T&C’s on our Natwest Mortgage.

However, we still can’t locate, and the bank are refusing to tell us where that particular term is on our Contract we signed, that states they ” >May< recalculate mortgage repayments should you make an over payment payment of £1000 or more in any month".

We're waiting to see if the Financial Services Ombudsman can get ANY response/closure to this dispute to the bank deciding to change our repayments, this time!

Personally, based on their total lack of responsiveness in addressing this Contractural issue I think we will have to take them to a civil court, to force them to answer a very simple question, pathetic isn't it.

Some of these T’s and C’s are impossible to decipher – it’s almost laughable. The root cause, however, is that FS have taken “transparency” to mean that we must tell you everything – all 30000 words if needs be. And as you have shown, with a little common sense and a customer perspective, these clauses can be significantly reduced in word count and complexity. What your analysis also highlights is, perhaps, the even greater problem with more complex financial products!

British Bankers’ Association here. Thank you for kicking off an interesting discussion.

Terms and conditions set out customers’ rights as well as their responsibilities – they are there principally for the benefit of customers. They should be considered as a reference book that is not necessarily read all at the same time, but that puts all the information customers need about their account in one place. And complementing the terms and conditions are the key facts documents and plain English guides banks produce for customers – and also their open offer to explain all terms and conditions in a branch or over the phone if preferred.

We would be happy to work with government and regulators to identify areas that could be shortened, without restricting customers’ ability to access their rights and responsibilities.

Interesting. Will you make the test more available to a larger group? It may not be so easy to regulate the responses but it might point out to people how to start reading T&Cs and prove a more general learning point?

So the British Bankers Association says:
“They should be considered as a reference book that is not necessarily read all at the same time,”
While almost all financial service sites require you to tick a box saying you have read the T&Cs.

A first step would be for T&Cs to be tailored to the actual financial product you have rather than being a single document with a myriad of sections, paragraphs, exceptions covering every type of account offered.

Another option would be for there to be an industry wide standard set of T&Cs with a separate very short list of differences provided by each bank/building society.

Interesting comment from the BBA. The T@C’s “…..are there principally for the benefit of customers.” This is not how customers see it – as the video showed, the customer viewpoint is that they’re there to protect the “legal backside” of the banks.”

If the banks, (and other FS firms), were truly applying the principles of fair treatment, they would be testing product literature, (including T’s & C’s), with their own customers. They would soon draw the same conclusions as Which?.

It is not just banks that compete with War & Peace when writing Ts & Cs eg travel companies, insurance companies, legal firms etc. I conclude that if they put in enough verbiage them we wont read them giving them a major advantage. As a cynic I believe that since their legal people cant write water-tight conditions they replace quality with quantity. And please not small print