Minor banks offering "high" interest rate

Hey, moonraker , I feel your dilemma but if you are that bored with money i'm happy for you to offload some of it to me if it helps.   

Mind you we are not exactly short of it to be fair having received my NSP last week Mrs Aju is making quite a dent in it though!. trying to find somewhere to dump it better at better rates its becoming very tedious but necessary to keep Mrs Aju's morale up!

Had some really slow stuff and confusing days with HSBC recently, it was a new account and it took nearly a month to get online access to the account and funds I wanted to put into the RegSaver - needless to say I only moved the required amounts to get the £125 first.

Got there in the end but it felt more than to much hard work for £125 sweetener. Once there though its very simple and works ok their phone line whilst not in this country was very good and helpful and quick. The RegSaver rate is only 2.75% but when factoring in the £125 - non taxable too - it definitely cuts in for us and is another place to move £250 a month and be working for us.

I didn't bother with Mrs Aju on this one though as whilst she may be seriously richer than me on paper her visible/allowable monthly income is outside the bounds that I think HSBC would accept - they have not in the past anyway.

I do wonder sometimes though having been a s/w designer in the distant past and in particular having a bent against using toys for any kind of banking at least where large sums are concerned that the large scale move to the toy (Mobiles) market is not helpful for luddites like me.

I have heard anecdotally of others getting this problem but assumed they perhaps didn't have as much of a personal credit file footprint as someone like myself and Mrs Aju have built up over the last 50 odd years or more .. You would wonder why sometimes these banks cannot cope with the wrong name!. (I guess its going to be more prevalent though as the banks increasingly are help accountable for frauds)

That said we had some issues recently with Ford Money in that our donor bank (Lloyds) could not recognise the correct FM names that FM suggested we use for payments . In Lloyds case it rejected the official FM name so I then asked FM what their correct name was but they reiterated the initial name that they gave me. I asked them why Lloyds was suggesting I use a completely different name and FM said the expected name Lloyds was the FM umbrella/head office ID name but the account name I signed up should have been as directed!. In my case after checking I was happy it was correct and the Sortcode & A/c Nos lined up I went back to Lloyds and sent a £1 test to FM and it got through ok after overriding the Lloyds system. 

Just a bit odd that Lloyds has the wrong name for the account and FM don't see it as their error. After all that the £1 send and the subsequent 5 figure amount sent for savings triggered a fraud flag and I ended up having to prove I was sending the money correctly for Lloyds to release it to the account. Fortunately Since I have been with Lloyds ever since I can remember they were able to secure check me over the phone and let the funds through but it beggars belief that any of this stuff works correctly.

Every cloud has a silver lining I guess as it does mean I can name the FM account on Lloyds as "Mrs Aju FM savings" rather than the official name name which helps down the line for identifying where to send subsequent donations.