Move Your Money teams up with NUS to help students switch

Young people are suffering some of the worst effects of the bank-driven recession of 2008, with graduate unemployment at its highest for over a decade.

But students and young people also have huge power to help build a better banking sector. The big banks count on attracting students with short term offers in the hope of making serious money out of the, for a long time — statistics show that you’re more likely to get divorced than to move your bank account.

Move Your Money is delighted to launch a guide in partnership with NUS, specifically aimed at helping students to help change all that.

Dannie Grufferty, NUS Vice-President (Society and Citizenship), said:

“Students have a long history of using our power as consumers to put pressure on big companies and bring about an end to unethical practices.

“Young people are suffering because of an economic crisis that they did not create and moving our money is a simple way to demand better for banks in the future.”

The guide sets out a simple five step guide which show how simple it is to switch banks, and dispels myths about switching your overdraft: almost all accounts with an overdraft can be transferred to a different provider. In fact, if you’re a recent graduate struggling to pay off your overdraft before your bank starts charging hefty fees, it may be cheaper to ask for a loan from your local credit union, as our case study, Charles, explains below.

But the campaign doesn’t end with individual students moving their money. Move Your Money wants to empower student groups to pick up the Move Your Money message and run with it — by setting up their own groups and lobbying their student unions to move their money too. Groups are already starting up in Manchester and Leeds as students realise this is a great way to engage with the financial sector and tell the banks that we won’t wait for change — we’ll build it ourselves.

Download the flyer here Page 1 and Page 2

Read an account of one recent graduate who’s already made the move. Charles Richer-Smith from Kent shows us how it’s done.

“I’d been thinking about moving my money from Barclays for a while: I don’t think there’s many people out there that presently agree with much, if anything, of what the banking sector have been doing since the bail outs. Their excessive bank charges, tax avoidance, filthy investments (like tar-sands) and generally side stepping all regulations are major issues that definitely need to be sorted. However for me it was the news that, despite owing the earth to the governments that bailed them out, they are still avoiding taxes and most off all, still awarding MASSIVE bonuses to the heads of the banks regardless of the fact they’re still causing us to teeter on the brink of another recession.

Seeing a small amount of information on the Move Your Money campaign was the final kick I needed to get out of high street banking. When I went to their website and found that the ethical score of Barclays to be the worst of all of them that was it, I was switching!

Using the information on this site, I found out about local credit union current accounts and the cooperative bank accounts and made the switch to the Cooperative bank.

The main road block for me was the need to clear a fairly large student overdraft before being able to close my account completely. After a little research I found loads of local credit unions that can fund this with a loan (I ended up going for a ‘save as you pay’ loan from Kent Credit Savers).

I think what I liked most about this process was when I rang up to enquire it became quickly apparent that I was speaking to the owners of these credit unions rather than some faceless drone in a call centre.

Overall I can’t see why it’s taken me as long as it has, it was completely painless and so easy to do online. I think it’s something everyone that believes in changing the way the banking system works should investigate. We’ve already seen that lobbying won’t change the way they work, regulations haven’t work even attempting to occupy the financial sector got squashed before getting close. The only thing they care about is their profits. We need to hit them where it hurts.”

Charles Richer-Smith is a recent graduate from Kent. You can follow him on Twitter @ThoughtDiver.

Originally published in March 2012 at moveyourmoney.org.uk