Saturday, August 27, 2011

Rejected by the Bank of Ireland

For about five minutes this week I felt rejected. The Bank of Ireland has refused a credit card application from me - I guess I am now officially a financial risk!

Image link from Orange.
Recently we decided to consolidate our bank and credit card accounts - this would make on-line banking a lot easier. We have a cheque book account with Bank of Ireland, savings with a well known building society, and credit card with a company whose employees are under threat in Co Leitrim (I did write the names of these institution first, but then deleted them thinking that that is just too much information to be posting). First up was a credit card application to BoI. We have a mortgage with BoI, have no overdraft (DG), no other loans, and we pay our credit card bill every month. I would have thought that would be OK for a new credit card?

I got a rejection letter from "S Mullen" who is a "Manager" in the Underwriting Dept of Credit Operations in Bank of Ireland who writes to me as follows:

Dear Dr O'Loughlin,

We carefully considered your application and applied our normal credit scoring process to the details you provided. Unfortunately, based on this analysis, our criteria does not permit us to offer you a Credit Card at present.

I was surprised by this and felt rejected - how dare they! And sure don't I, as a taxpayer, own part of Bank of Ireland anyway? And they have the cheek to tell me that they must keep the exact acceptance requirements confidential. Why do they bother doing this? I'm sure that under FoI I could find out anyway (if I was @rsed). So here we have a bank that f*cked up our country (they were not alone in this), is part-owned by us, has been bailed out by us (and the Germans), that will cost the country billions for years to come - and they reject my business because I pose too much of a risk! 

I'm sure their criteria for acceptance are much tougher than when they were throwing money at us all a few years ago. The Financial Regulator is now paying attention! We know that being able to breath was previously all that was needed to get a loan or a credit card from the banks. I'd just love to know what acceptance requirements I did not meet. I bet it was a €50 lodgement to Paddy Power that did it?

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