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Savers who want the best easy access account rate must answer a barrage of intrusive questions or else settle for lower paying options.
Virgin Money’s easy access account pays 1.45pc, making it the top rate available. However, the lender makes its customers answer far more questions than any of its rivals, and about more personal topics.
Aside from standard questions such as name and date of birth, customers must tell Virgin the name of their first school, where they were born, what they want to save for, where the money is coming from and their job.
They are quizzed on their gender, whether they own or rent a home and, if they rent, whether the property is furnished or not.
Virgin also asks for their National Insurance numbers and names of employers, although it does not insist on this.
The more questions a bank demands answers to, the harder it becomes to take the deal out and the less inclined a saver is to hand over a lot of personal information.
Anna Bowes, of Savings Champion, the personal finance analysts, said: “Providers that ask unusual questions could turn savers off. It could mean people are distrustful.”
By comparison, the second-best easy access rate is 1.44pc, from Marcus, and the bank asks far fewer – and less personal – questions.
Marcus asks 16 questions compared to Virgin’s 23, and omits questions about topics such as gender, school, birthplace and residential status.
The next-best rate is 1.4pc, from Britannia and Yorkshire Building Society, which ask 15 and 14 questions respectively.
A Virgin Money spokesman said: “Due to regulatory requirements, we ask a number of questions on our application forms for our savings accounts that we believe are relevant and important in order to establish the identity of our customers and the source of the savings balance they are investing with us.
“We open tens of thousands of savings account each year and carefully monitor the conversion rates, which are among the highest in the industry, and the majority of applicants complete the journey successfully and go on to save with us, so we don’t believe our questions are an unnecessary barrier. We continually monitor these processes though to ensure the customer experience is not a barrier to applying.”
Easy access accounts are a low fraud risk as typically the deals only allow users to pay cash back into another of their accounts, rather than to a third party.
The Virgin deal is an even lower fraud risk than the average easy access account, as customers can only withdraw money twice a year.
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