Bristol & West offers borrowers £1,000 golden goodbye
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Bristol & West is offering its mortgage customers an incentive of £1,000 if they remortgage using London & Country.
David Hollingworth, a mortgage specialist at London & Country, says he can confirm that Bristol & West borrowers are being offered £1,000 for using the brokerage.
He says: “The Bank of Ireland has launched various schemes to encourage people to remortgage over the past few years and we have worked with it on a number of these.
“This latest initiative is currently a pilot that is being offered to a limited number of Bristol & West customers.”
Bristol & West is a fully owned subsidiary of the Bank of Ireland. The Bank of Ireland was not available to comment or confirm whether the deal is exclusively via L&C.
Edeus first coined the phrase golden goodbye in July 2008, offering selected borrowers a cashback option to encourage them to redeem their mortgages early and waiving early repayment charges.
And in June 2009 Morgan Stanley and GMAC-RFC were revealed to be offering borrowers 15-20% golden goodbyes.
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Readers' comments (21)
Anonymous | 10 Aug 2011 1:12 pm
Is that not bribery under the FSA rules?
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AB | 10 Aug 2011 1:14 pm
Does this not come under the bribery act, or are Lenders exempt as usual!!!
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John Lacy | 10 Aug 2011 1:18 pm
Thank you Bank of Ireland and Bristol and West---it's nice to see you rewarding the brokers that gave you the original business by trying to sell our clients to another brokerage.
To quote the old Irish curse "May you melt from the earth like snow from a ditch"
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Anonymous | 10 Aug 2011 1:18 pm
So clients on SVR's of 2.99% will be encouraged to move to another lender for, wait for it, £1000! You just couldn't make it up. Was this designed by the same Rocket Scientist that closed down BOI's excellent intermediary teams and passed this to The Post Office.
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Keith | 10 Aug 2011 1:18 pm
is this treating customers fairly restricting them just to one brokerage??
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Anonymous | 10 Aug 2011 1:24 pm
Surely this is unacceptable? especially as many of my own clients were placed with B&W many years ago, B&W are basically saying use L&C from now on and we will give you a grand! Why not use your existing adviser and we will give you a grand. Do they know why riots start!!! absolutely disgraceful from a lender who has been supported for years...
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Matt Colley | 10 Aug 2011 1:32 pm
I posted on 'UK Mortgage Professionals Network' group on LinkedIn about this a couple of weeks ago, because one of my clients has already been poached by this scheme.
Unsurprisingly, I'm utterly appalled. I can understand that lenders wish to clear their book. If they want to hand away £1,000 to the customer to do so, then fine! What is truly offensive is incentivising / bribing clients to use a particular brokerage, and messing with existing client & adviser relationships (which probably provided the customer to the lender in the first place!)
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Phil Alvey | 10 Aug 2011 1:39 pm
These are existing clients of other brokers who are being lured to London & Country by the promise of £1000. Given that the industry relies on the fact that client information, once passed to lenders, is not divulged to other parties, what is London and Country's role in this and would they be happy if other lenders take a similar view and offered their clients to other brokers - openseason!
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Anonymous | 10 Aug 2011 1:43 pm
Now now this is not a bribe it is an incentive!!!
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Anonymous | 10 Aug 2011 1:53 pm
This is not a bribe or an incentive, it is an inducement and as such is illegal! It is also immoral to ignore the Broker who introduced the clients to them in the first instance. Lenders hide behind Data Protection every day, how can this not be a breach of that particular act?!
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