Danske Bank to purchase National Irish Bank

D

Dearg Doom

Guest
See [broken link removed] and [broken link removed].
 
Will this mark the end of the [broken link removed] account? Or will they start to agressively market the Freebank account and steal business from the big guys?
 
I opened a Freebank account ages ago (around the time I started being inspired by all you clever clogs on AAM!) but am yet to switch to it for my day-to-day banking.

Primary reason is not laziness but rather I really like BOI's Banking 365 - I find the web version very good, and I have to say I find their phone service excellent on the rare occassion I have to use it.

So much so that I'm willing to pay for the privilege. Last time I asked people (about 2yrs ago) the NIB web/phone offering wasn't up to much. Has it improved?
 
NIB v. BOI online banking

I use both BoI 365 online and NIB's online banking. Both are similar, but I prefer NIB for 2 main reasons:

(1) With NIB you can set up your own payees as and when you like, change details, reference to appear on statement etc. With BoI you must ring a customer service agent (phone banking) for this. I suppose the intention is increased security in the BoI method, in that if someone later claims they weren't the one who added a payee and then emptied the a/c, they can go back and check the recording of the phonecall, but to be honest, I don't think the benefit outweighs the hassle.

(2) NIB seem to do electronic transfers faster. With BoI, they say to allow 3 working days for transactions, & in my experience it's always taken this long. The money departs from your BoI a/c immediately, but doesn't arrive elsewhere for 3 days. In the meantime, it's presumably sitting in some BoI holding a/c earning them interest.
With NIB, it may take 3 days, but I've also had transactions go through in just 1 or 2 days.

Also, if I remember rightly, BoI have a limit on how much money you can transfer in 24 hrs. NIB don't have a daily limit, but they do have a transaction limit, so if you want to transfer say €20k, without standing in line at your local branch, you can do so all on the same day with NIB (in 4 transactions of €5k each), whereas with BoI my recollection [though I haven't used BoI to transfer large sums in a while] is that you'd have to split it over a couple of days.

That said, I prefer BoI's on-screen display, where they give a running balance after each transaction. The NIB display only shows the current balance and a list of transactions.
 
Back
Top