Intelligent Finance

By: EconomyWatch Content   Date: 5 November 2009

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As part of the Lloyds Group and a division of the Bank of Scotland plc, Intelligent Finance is an ‘offset’ bank operating in the UK. Its genesis can be traced to the year, 2000 when it was first established as a division of Halifax plc. Due to the re-organization of the HBOS group, it became a division of the Bank of Scotland plc.

Intelligent Finance (IF) is headquartered in Edinburgh and has its customer care operations based around Scotland in cities such as Livingston, Fife, Rosyth and West Lothian. Their focus was to deliver a banking service that utilized new technology to reduce overheads and thereby offer more cost effective financial products.

Also, Intelligent Finance offered the flexibility of picking its products as a bouquet or a package. Consumers could pick current account, credit cards and saving accounts as a package and offset their current account’s balances for their credit amounts.

Intelligent Finances: Products and Services

With the Internet as their medium, Intelligent Finance came up with many cost effective products that offered attractive rates and charged lesser rates of interest.

Below is the list of a few of some of its products:

iSaver: These accounts offer an interest rate of 2.49% and let consumers access their account with speed. Being online, this service offers transparency and promises to pay at least 1% above the Bank of England’s base rate.

  • Direct access savings: These accounts are ideal for consumers who are looking for easy access to their account at any time. With interest rates at 0.05% AER, the accounts let consumers earn interest as well.
  • Cash ISA: Those who are looking to save tax find the Cash ISA extremely useful. Besides offering easy accessibility via phone or online, Cash ISA accounts offer an interest rate of 2.50% as well.

Intelligent Finances also offered credit cards and mortgages until 2005 and 2009 respectively. The credit cards were discontinued due to the high cost of running the operations. Also, mortgages were made unavailable for new consumers. This meant that consumers could not apply for additional amounts and take their existing mortgage loan to a new home.

 


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