Examination of Witnesses (Questions 298-299)
MR JOHN
VARLEY, SIR
FRED GOODWIN,
MR SHANE
FLYNN AND
MR MICHAEL
GEOGHEGAN
26 OCTOBER 2004
Q298 Chairman: Good morning gentlemen.
Welcome to this, our second session on the transparency of credit
cards. Can I ask you to introduce yourselves for the record?
Mr Geoghegan: Michael
Geoghegan from HSBC.
Mr Varley: John Varley from Barclays.
Sir Fred Goodwin: Fred Goodwin,
the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Mr Flynn: Good morning, Shane
Flynn, MBNA Europe.
Q299 Chairman: Welcome, you know some
of your colleagues in industry were in last week. I am sure you
have seen the video and you know the type of questions, so this
must be an easy session for you. It is over a year since the Committee
started its inquiry into the transparency of credit cards and,
as you know, we feel there has been quite a lot of progress undertaken
in that past year by yourselves. We are aware also there is quite
a way to go yet in this issue of transparency and competitiveness
and we would like your views this morning on where you think your
companies are at, where you have acceded to the APACS recommendations
and where we can go on this so that we can close this off. The
Committee will be looking at this issue and coming out with a
short report, hopefully in advance of the Consumer Credit Act
going through Parliament so that can inform Parliament and inform
the industry. Can I start with you then and ask where you have
gone beyond the minimum requirements negotiated by APACS and what
progress you have made in the year, Mr Varley from Barclays Bank?
Mr Varley: Thank you Chairman.
I hope you know that Barclays and Barclaycard have taken the Committee's
inquiry and the issues that it has raised very seriously. Over
the last year we have worked hard to improve transparency for
consumers. We support fully all the industry wide agreements that
have been reached and we have either already implemented them
or are in the throes of doing so and in a number of areas, to
your point, we have gone further. We re-designed all our marketing
material to make it clearer and more transparent, we have rewritten
our terms and conditions and we have increased print sizes wherever
possible. From September 2004, scenarios describing the costs
and time frames of making minimum repayments only started appearing
on our marketing material. We have included a generic summary
box on Barclaycard monthly statements, and we will follow suit
in Monument in the early New Year. To help customers more easily
understand their personal cost of using a Barclaycard we have
launched an online calculator. This month our Barclaycard branded
statements will include minimum payment warnings on the summary
box and the same statement will appear on all our marketing material
in November. Also in November, we will be adding the industry
agreed interest calculation row to our summary boxes. This is
designed to help customers understand more easily the interest
calculation method we use. Barclaycard is committed to improving
transparency where we can. We will consider carefully, of course,
any suggestion that benefits consumers and, in particular, we
would like to work with the industry and Government to improve
the current situation with regard to credit data sharing.
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