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Experiences of RCI Bank?

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Julian
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Experiences of RCI Bank?

#222781

Postby Julian » May 18th, 2019, 4:09 pm

Does anyone have a Premium Savings account from RCI Bank (https://www.rcibank.co.uk/savings/freedom)?

From what I've read it ticks almost all of my boxes. I need a savings account that will effectively do standing orders so that I can set it up to pay a fixed amount each month and I want it to pay as much interest as possible on my balance of course. By definition a monthly standing order going out precludes any account with a limit on the number of withdrawals per year (assuming the limit is fewer than 12!) so I'm looking at easy access and those that have the ability to set up regular payments out are very rare.

Right now I use IF Finance (part of Lloyds Group) but they are trying to run that down and the interest rate is 0.25% compared to the 1.42% for RCI.

The info on the RCI website doesn't actually say it can do monthly withdrawals and I will obviously check with RCI before going further but a comment dated October 2018 from dgp1000 right at the end of a thread on the MoneySavingsExpert forums (https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/sh ... ?t=5778676) says...

I know this is an old thread, but RCI Bank allow standing orders to be paid from their Freedom Savings Account (currently paying 1.3%). All payments to and from need to be from your linked current account, but this shouldn't be a problem in michaelmorris circumstances, as I use mine in the same way as he wants to use his.


... so I am optimistic that it will meet my key criteria. I can live with all money in and out needing to go through a single linked current account.

There are a couple of nice-to-have features (for me) that the account doesn't seem to have namely (1) an iOS (or Android I assume) app for easier management, and (2) membership of Open Banking so that I could see my RCI account balance from within my main NatWest app. Maybe one or both of those are coming but I can live without them.

So...

- Can anyone already with an account confirm dgp1000's info that the RCI Premium Savings account still does support standing orders?

- Has anyone already enquired about an app and/or Open Banking participation and if yes then what answers did you get if any?

- Does anyone have any other candidates for decent interest savings account that support standing-order payments out that I might have missed? None of the other candidates on that MoneySavingsExpert thread would work for me by the way because either the balance in my account will on average be way higher than the £10K or so that would be optimal if using an interest-paying current account to do the job and the other suggestions of Yorkshire or Newcastle Building Societies didn't seem to be anything like the 1.42% interest rate of RCI Bank.

- Julian

supremetwo
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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#222882

Postby supremetwo » May 18th, 2019, 10:46 pm

Freedom Savings Account
Make a Payment
From the payments set-up page:-
Is this a regular payment?
How often would you like to make this payment?
Date of first payment.
Please select - weekly - monthly.

Note that they do not yet offer fast payments, only BACS so there will be next 'working-day' delays if a date falls on a week-end or a bank holiday.

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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#222884

Postby colboy » May 18th, 2019, 10:56 pm

Hi Julian
I've had an RCI account for a while. Its a basic savings account. It does do regular payments eg weekly or monthly only to the nominated current account used for paying in.
It does not have an app at present but it can be accesed on your phone through a browser and is easily operated that way.
Also now has fscs approval ie uk based compensation up to 85k, previously was a EU scheme 100k euros. Interest rate is fair and keeps pace with the market

Julian
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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#222945

Postby Julian » May 19th, 2019, 11:18 am

Thanks supremetwo and colboy. Very reassuring to see that precise description of how withdrawals are set up.

I confess that I am having a few wobbles re RCI after seeing the Trustpilot reviews (https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/rcibank.co.uk). This account is going to be pretty central to how money flows around my system and a failure to make a scheduled payout one month could result in bill and credit card payments failing. Issues with deposits into the account would be frustrating but not critical provided they were resolved within a few weeks.

I find it frustrating how rare savings accounts that provide a facility for regular payments-out (withdrawals) to be set up are. I suppose it is a very niche requirement so few organisations feel it worth investing the development effort in adding that feature to their systems.

- Julian

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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#223080

Postby Gan020 » May 20th, 2019, 7:52 am

I've had an account for about 2 years. I am very happy with it. I get a decent rate of interest and I don't have to keep moving my money around to get the best rate as they only have one instant access savings account with no bonus, so none of this having to move once the bonus runs out and further when they increase the interest rate that's exactly what happens, again none of the new higher interest rate only being available to new customers or having to set up a new account with the same provider to get the best interest rate.

I read the trustpilot stuff and to me it looks mostly like moans because people don't understand the restrictions which are:

a) you can only pay in and out to your linked bank account (due to money laundering I think). You can change your linked account but this takes a couple of days.
b) it does take a working day or so for withdrawals to take place (I think the cut-off is midday for money to arrive the next day but this could be the same day I can't remember and it's never bothered me). I would suggest part of the reason they can offer 1.42% is because they get a day to manage all their receipts and withdrawals and access the money market. If you take this away I assume their costs of finance go up and they won't be able to offer 1.42%.

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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#223084

Postby scrumpyjack » May 20th, 2019, 8:35 am

My wife and I have had savings accounts for a couple of years with RCI. Absolutely no problems.

Julian
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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#223125

Postby Julian » May 20th, 2019, 12:02 pm

Brill. Thanks Gan020 and scrumpyjack. Your comments plus a bit of pondering on my part over the weekend and running some what-if scenarios about what would happen if a monthly RCI withdrawal failed to arrive on time (how much float I would need vs how overdrawn I would go if a payment failed plus what balance monitoring tools are available for my destination account to detect an issue and how much time that would give me to correct it before going overdrawn) has allayed my concerns. I'm going to go ahead with opening an RCI account.

I tend to agree with you on the Trustpilot thing, I think Trustpilot has more value when there are thousands of reviews, a small sample size like the RCI feedback is unlikely to be representative.

- Julian

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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#223158

Postby DrBunsenHoneydew » May 20th, 2019, 1:21 pm

I have had this account (& a 3-Year Bond) for over 2 years. It works exactly as outlined above. The only timing issues you need to allow for are weekends and long bank holidays.
For example I have a monthly outgoing standing order to my linked account on the 17th. The money actually arrived at noon today.
You can see what might happen to the receipt of funds if the date occurs around Easter holiday weekend near the key day.

Julian
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Re: Experiences of RCI Bank?

#223162

Postby Julian » May 20th, 2019, 1:45 pm

DrBunsenHoneydew wrote:I have had this account (& a 3-Year Bond) for over 2 years. It works exactly as outlined above. The only timing issues you need to allow for are weekends and long bank holidays.
For example I have a monthly outgoing standing order to my linked account on the 17th. The money actually arrived at noon today.
You can see what might happen to the receipt of funds if the date occurs around Easter holiday weekend near the key day.

Yup. Thanks. Long weekends were very definitely factored into my "How much time would I have to react were a payment not to arrive?" analysis and I took Easter as the worst-case scenario

I actually left a full calendar week in my planning before declaring a payment "faulty" (maybe not actioned by BCI that month for some reason) on a worst-case assumption of a payment initiated by BCI late in the day on Easter Thursday (if initiated after I think it's 14:00 the BCI payment table says that it will actually take 2 working days to arrive so that would be no progress on Fri/Sat/Sun/Mon, Tue not there because it was initiated late in the day on the Thursday, should arrive Wednesday but I added one more day just in case there was some temporary little one-off glitch that month. I will be setting my monitoring to look a week after initiation date and if it's not in by then I have 5 calendar days to react and get money into the account before standing orders potentially push me into overdraft. The target account will be an HSBC current account and I have a float in a Natwest account that I could transfer across in about 1 minute (it really is that quick, I've done it before) so I think I can easily accommodate BCI's slower non-FPS withdrawals.

Hopefully BCI will address that issue anyway at some point but not a disaster if they don't.

- Julian


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