Current Account Switching and Free Money

If you're seriously interested in exploiting this source of "free money" then I can recommend looking at the banking section of the MSE forum here: forums.moneysavingexpert.com/categories/budgeting-bank-accounts

There are several banks currently offering incentives to switch, the only hitch is that customers who have received an incentive from that bank in the past won't get another incentive! 

Edit:  crossed with dead-money's post.  Once I identify a switching offer, I closely check the terms & conditions of the offer for the exclusions - an exclusion date for previous incentives is usually present - then it's a process of trying to remember when my last incentive from XYZ Bank was received!

And to answer the specific question you asked about banks monitoring switching: Yes, a bank will keep a record of incentives each customer has received but it's unlikely that there's a data-base somewhere recording incentives any customer has received from another bank, other than the credit agencies recording the opening of new current accounts.  I've exploited these switching offers from many banks over the last decade or so - I've never been refused.

I don't think they do.  I take advantage of switch offers whenever they are available and managed to switch back to the banks I've switch out of before.  I always make sure I have enough accounts opened for switch opportunities, majority of them have £0 balance.

Probably not so much for power presentation, but for the custom. A lot of people go overdraft, buy insurance, foreign currency (holiday money), take loans, mortgages etc. I don't know for sure, but I think we are the tiny minority that don't really matter on the scale banks make profit from these offers. 

Lets hope not as we have quite a few more accounts than we are supposed to across quite a number of banks. 

Virgin money springs to mind as their rules were changed recently due to internal consolidations but they still don't seem to be policed as yet - fingers crossed. We used to have the 6 x £5 halifax deal for a number of years until very recently where there are now better rates elsewhere for the cost of the accounts so we closed them after making > £3000 on them for quite a number of years before closing them. They recently reopened the process but we stopped it as better rates appeared elsewhere too.

Mrs aju complains as to why we have so many accounts all mostly automated using back and forth processes between each other. The spreads are quite large now so i recently got rid of the lower rates and concentrated on the better ones. Mrs aju will become a fully fledged pensioner this year and will then be paying tax so we are probably going to have to change our strategy a bit to accommodate the tax issues with the higher rates. The biggest problem with mainstream ISA's is the way that are creaming off the tax benefits with lower rates. 

My bad English when i said closing them i meant we kept the accounts on but they just have £1 each in them for similar reasons as one never knows whats coming down the track. The old 3 each ones were used a while back we now just had 1 each  but have not found anything to move them to as yet.

Was doing it few years back.. not really free money because it will impact credit score if doing that too frequent..