Lenders punish loyalty with £26bn haul

BY TRICIA PHILLIPS BRITAIN’S biggest banks are set to announce a £26billion profit – helped by just 0.1 per cent of current account customers ditching them.

A decade on from the onset of the financial crisis, the Big Five – Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and Santander – still have a stranglehold on the current account market.

Figures from the Current Account Switch Service show they lost just 84,100 customers combined in the first half of last year.

Given a customer base of nearly 60million, the figure represents just 0.14 per cent of Brits.

This helped swell the banks’ coffers. HSBC are expected to announce annual profits of about £14billion today – with analysts predicting £5.8billion from Lloyds tomorrow, £4.7billion from Barclays on Thursday and a potential £1.6billion from RBS on Friday. Santander made £1.8billion last year. Big banks rake in £10billion from rip-off fees on current accounts, according to analysis of more than 11,000 such accounts by financial app Plum. Paul Pester, boss of challenger bank TSB, said: “People don’t move accounts because they don’t know what they are paying for their banking, they can’t all switch easily and they aren’t aware of the switching service.”

James Daley, managing director and founder of Fairer Finance, said: “It’s pretty shocking that such a tiny proportion of people switch their account.

“All banking studies have identified having a really small number of big companies controlling the market is giving consumers a bad deal.

“Despite the Competition and Markets Authority looking into this and the introduction of Open Banking, it doesn’t feel any closer to cracking the cartel of the Big Five.” Oil RSA RBS J Sainsbury SSE Severn Trent Serco Sports Direct Shell Sky Smith & Nephew Smiths WH 606.8 275.6 251.2 1201.5 1714.5 89.0 357.6 2283.0 1103.0 1263.0 2044.0 -3.6 +0.2 +0.3 +1.5 -23.5 -0.2 -4.5 -5.5 +2.0 -16.5 -20.0