This is interesting as we too spotted this clause in the PTSB waiver guidance documentation as above
“
If you are over 66 years (or between 60 & 66 years if your account was opened on or before 13th January 2018) you are eligible for fee and charge exemption regardless of the balance maintained in your account." This is very clear in plain English.
So we qualify on age and as our personal current account was opened well before 2018, we wrote a couple of weeks ago to our local branch with evidence of age, copy of the relevant section and applied for this waiver.
I’ve received a call and email today from K******* , Senior Customer Experience Champion in which she said that the request was referred up to PTSB HQ and that they have now changed the wording in their online guidance to
https://www.ptsb.ie/account-change/...re over 66,balance maintained in your account.
So it now says “
If you are over 66 years (or between 60 & 66 years if your account was opened on or before 13th January 2018) you are eligible for fee and charge exemption regardless of the balance maintained in your account. This means the presence of an account holder who, from our records, is over 66 years old (or if you opened your account on or before 13 January 2018 and were 60 years or older at the time of opening the account). This exemption will remain in place as long as at least one account holder falls into the age category mentioned above.”
However both these statements above conflict and the retained text “
If you are over 66 years (or between 60 & 66 years if your account was opened on or before 13th January 2018) you are eligible for fee and charge exemption regardless of the balance maintained in your account” can only mean one thing in plain English and that is that we qualify.
So they’re trying to add a qualifier to this now that you must also have been 60 when opening this account prior to 2018, so that in effect you’d be 66 now in 2024 and therefore automatically eligible. But my question is, can a financial institution just do this? Change the meaning of what's down in plain English?
My suspicion is It looks to us that PTSB changed the longstanding T&Cs that stated if you kept the account balance above €2500, that there would be free banking. But when doing this, PTSB realised that they had long standing customers who might change their banks and to mitigate the effects on those over 60, sensibly had this exemption for customers of long standing with this age profile. But are now trying to back track?? They also offered another type of account but we stayed deliberately on the old account.
If the above clause “
If you are over 66 years (or between 60 & 66 years if your account was opened on or before 13th January 2018) you are eligible for fee and charge exemption regardless of the balance maintained in your account." holds true, then there could be a quite a cohort of PTSB customers aged 60-66 that should be getting free banking and due a refund on charges already taken??