How easy is it to move bank accounts?

Things can go wrong if you try to do it all in one go, but why do you need to think of it as a 'move'? Just open an account at the new bank and gradually migrate everything across. When all is working fine with the new account you can close the old one. That gives you a fallback position if the new bank doesn't turn out to be as good as you thought they'd be.

Chris

Without a hint of irony, Chris Blunt astounded uk.finance on 11 Feb 2004 by announcing:

That's the best thing to do, IMHO. I moved from Barclays to cahoot over 3 years ago and still have a Barclays account purely to draw cheques against - cahoot offer a lower credit interest rate if you take a cheque book.

I moved from HSBC to Halifax, and it was pretty easy. They did the hard work of getting the direct debits from the previous bank, moving them, and so on. I had to just sign a few letters. It did take a couple of months to complete the process however.

It was easier than doing it by hand, but I imagine something could go wrong (nothing did though). They also gave me an interest-free moving overdraft in case the payments started before my salary was moved.

cd

In message , Mr Bean writes

Dead Easy.

I moved HSBC > Smile last year.

Opened the a/c, got familiar with it and understood how it all worked.

Smile provide letters to action the transfer process. Sign one and send it back, which authorises the transfer of DD & SO. Nearly all my regular transactions are right at the start of the month, so I kicked of the process (which take ~14 days) just after that. There's another letter you give to your employer to rearrange your salary payments.

And that's it really. Everything just happened. There was a small error on one DD, but to Smile's credit it was all sorted with no intervention from me at all.

My money was on Npower / Northern Electric to be the one most likely to balls it up, but even they got it right.

So don't sit on the fence, just do it.

Unless you have dividends or interest paid into you account - for those you have to write the letters yourself.