On a related note, any idea when Visa and MC let you get a balance in an ATM. I know you couldn’t do that when I first got Monzo and Starling in (I think) 2018.
I stand corrected. That’s really interesting, I’d never heard of such a thing and there’s no information about them even on the LINK website. All I can find is this article from 2004!
AIUI the cash deposits at the Post Office don’t make use of LINK tho. If you withdraw money you’ll see the transaction is marked on the receipt as happening via LINK. If you deposit, it doesn’t and instead calls out the specific bank deposited with.
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When? Here’s the relevant Post Office page in 2012:
Notably it does separate the FlexAccount out so perhaps it did, but in any case I would suggest a feature which has been disabled for at least 12 years at this point is highly likely to no longer be in a place where it could be simply re-enabled!
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You should be able to, so long as the cash machine correctly supports Mastercard’s Cirrus (or Visa’s Plus). Most are marked suggesting they support both, although I think in the early days of Starling/Mondo some were found lacking.
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Must have been even longer ago than I thought. The problem was that, as the 2012 site hints, it only ever worked with the cash card version of Flex Basic. As far as I know, they stopped issuing those quite a while back.
Maybe this time next year if they have a rush of blood to the head and ditch the current Nationwide app in favour of a rebadged Virgin one.
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I hope the transaction brings talent and ultimately improvements to what they currently have, but as ever with Nationwide, I would suggest patience is key.
The Nationwide was the first to offer banking on the internet so, all being well, it’ll get back to being innovative.
Yes, we do seem to have strayed somewhat from Monzo 
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I suspect the merger of the various aspects of Nationwide and Virgin will take quite a while unfortunately. Even now, Virgin still hasn’t integrated the original Northern Rock and Virgin accounts with what’s now called Virgin. They had said at the time that this would be easy as all they needed to do was CASS over those accounts.
Credit cards might be easier as they both seem to use TSys as the backend. So, in theory, just tell people to ditch the current Virgin credit card app and use the Nationwide one.
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Based on nothing at all, except pure speculation, for personal current/savings accounts I think the integration will work something like this:
- Work on the VM/CYBG/credit card integration project, if it remains ongoing, are ceased.
- Nationwide current accounts brought up to relative ‘feature parity’ with Virgin Money app - that means app features like cheque deposit, payee references, Google/Apple pay integration… quite a few bits. Club M and FlexPlus will have their insurances/providers and account costs harmonised. This is probably a multi-year project all by itself!
- Virgin Money products become NLA. Upon savings maturity, customers are invited to open new accounts with Nationwide, with the carrot of ‘becoming a member, eligible for future fairer shares’ etc.
- Current accounts are transitioned product by product to equivalent Nationwide ones. Perhaps for some of the more niche ones, like Virgin Money Essentials (the pre-CYBG very limited Virgin Money offer) users are told to CASS away (perhaps with a carrot to CASS to Nationwide) or face closure on a certain date (ala Tesco Bank/M&S Bank closure).
- Mopping up exercise to transition any remaining easy access savings accounts to Nationwide in the same fashion.
What will be interesting is how what’s left of Virgin Money will then be treated. We know it’ll be rebranded - might they (re)use the Clydesdale brand? Will it be branded in common with Nationwide to reflect its mutual ownership? Do Nationwide’s limited credit cards/investment products move to them?
I note Head for Points, often on the money with these things, has predicted that the Credit Card division will be sold off and goes further suggesting it’s been a source of problems for Virgin Money. Could it be, perhaps, an avenue for Branson/Virgin Group to keep the Virgin Money brand on the market? A good amount of that business is strongly synergised (via a JV) with Virgin Atlantic already.
Even if not, I suspect we’ll see the ‘Virgin Money’ name again in the UK, as we had Virgin Trains and Virgin Radio after their original operations ended/dropped the license.
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I think you’re broadly correct.
My guess is that they will simply drop the Virgin credit card app and move everything over to the Nationwide and potentially fairly quickly as the backend is the same. I think they’ll drop Slyce as BNPL seems to have dropped off elsewhere and it would be more complicated to move.
They will likely have to move to free overseas use on debit cards and see about paying interest. That done, they could CASS everyone over in theory.
They’ll just run down Virgin savings so no new accounts, which is what they did on previous takeovers. At some point, they’ll just move over what’s left in savings.
Mortgages could move easily enough I think, though there are some inconsistencies which could complicate things.
I think they might use Clydesdale as their business bank.
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I don’t think they can CASS over customers themselves - because account details would have to change en-masse and all the historic transaction data would be lost between systems. That’s acceptable in a situation where the customer is choosing to move themselves but not acceptable when their lender is ‘shuffling the cards’ of their own volition.
This is why I think it’d only really work for products they weren’t too concerned about closing completely - I can see them being comfortable with dropping the small number of legacy Virgin Money Essentials rather than doing a proper migration (with CASS offered as an alternative to affected customers), but I can’t see them effectively sunsetting the CYBG current accounts without one.
I was wondering about the CASS initiated by the bank myself but that’s what Virgin proposed to do four or five years back.
It’s not just Virgin Essentials, there are also Northern Rock current accounts too.
That said, I would have thought that they could do essentially a CASS+ and take the transaction details too.
I had a look at their login and if I were Nationwide, I’d just bin all that and move everything to the Nationwide platform. They would need some upgrades like, maybe, MasterCard support (although Virgin were all Visa not that long ago). PIN issuance would change as Nationwide post it, Virgin provide it in app.
For those interested, you may want to look at the Co-operation Agreement between Nationwide and Virgin Money.
A long document which includes:
Credit Cards: Virgin Money has a strong unsecured lending business, with £6.7 billion of balances, including an estimated 8.6 per cent. market share of UK credit cards, which the Nationwide Board believes will complement Nationwide’s existing product offering and unsecured lending.
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Nationwide x Virgin Atlantic?
Can’t see them taking on the Virgin Atlantic card to be honest. That said, if they did maybe it would start them down the path of other affinity cards in time.
The other Virgin cards could move over easily enough as the backend processing is all done by TSys. What they’d likely do is replace Virgin cards with Nationwide ones as they expired so over about four years or so.
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It’s interesting but not binding on either party. In large takeovers like this, which often take longer than both sides initially hope, the businesses tend to put out reassuring noises that essentially everything’s great and all changes will be for the better. Imagine you worked in the credit card division and Nationwide instead said ‘the cards are beyond what we require and we’ll seek to divest or close down the division post-acquisition’ - how would you feel about your job?
It’s all very easily wriggled out of. I remember when NTL and Telewest merged together there was a similar document where they promised among other things that their successful content operation Flextech would continue. Three years later there’d been a change of strategy meaning the content business was no longer required…
I can’t think why else they’d be making clear their intention to enter exclusive negotiations with Virgin RED?
Because they feel they have to. I just don’t see them running with it long-term. That said I could be wrong and maybe they’re thinking of a relationship like co-op bank had with the co-op group until not that long ago. With that, you used to get co-op points based on your balance. Maybe something like the way NatWest used to pay interest in airmiles instead of cash on some accounts.
Still do for their Members Credit Card. Why they continue to do it that way, given Co-op Group themselves haven’t sent a divi in a decade now, I don’t know.
Not as long ago as a decade in my co-op but definitely stopped now.
The members card isn’t that useful as you have to use the points in the co-op i.e. if you were getting a lot by using it for everything, you might have trouble spending them.
It is back
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