Jeff Prestridge

Let’s not beat around the mulberry bush. Nationwide Building Society is a force for good in the murky world of personal finance. It is more consumer-centric than its banking rivals and believes in delivering customer service par excellence. Virtues sadly lacking across swathes of the financial world. It has even opened a new branch this

It is not usually feasible to put the great and good of the financial services industry together in a room and get them to agree on anything. Typically, they squabble like alley cats, arguing about everything on and off the agenda, even  the state of the weather. Occasionally, blows are traded. Yet a few days

I have always had a soft spot for building societies. Maybe it’s because I worked for one in the 1980s as an economist. Bristol & West it was called, and long since gone to the cemetery for building societies (not many plots left). Lovely departmental boss, no work pressure and little economic analysis required. But

Back in the 1980s, when I was embarking on a lifetime of sweat, toil and tears in order to bring home the bacon, I lived in a pensions desert. I couldn’t see, feel or feed one (a pension, that is) for miles around. During this decade, against a backdrop of privatisations, a rampant Prime Minister (Margaret

Cast your mind back to Saturday, 5 November. It is 8.30 am in Edinburgh and Tesco Bank boss Benny Higgins is sitting down to breakfast. The taxi he orders every weekend has picked up the papers from the local newsagent so he can flick through them over salmon and scrambled egg. Higgins likes his taxis. He

Nuisance calls are the bane of my life – as are unprompted texts. They assault my mobile at all hours, night and day. I find the calls so annoying and invasive that I now leave my phone on permanent silent which kind of defeats the object of a mobile (I don’t have a landline at

Poor customer service is endemic across swathes of British industry. It plagues some of our biggest companies and as customers we should not have to put up with it. After all, this is the UK, one of the richest countries in the world. Or am I wrong? It’s time, I say, to stand up, be counted

We are fast approaching a time when massive tracts of this fine country of ours (greenfield, brownfield, urban, rural) will be bank-free zones. Villages and towns stripped of their last bank. Goodbye pub, goodbye convenience store and now goodbye bank. Yes, ultimately goodbye community. Last week’s disappointing report from the Competition and Markets Authority on

Although a few uncertainties have been removed from the political landscape in recent days – hail Empress Regnant Theresa May – it would be a mistake to think that normality has now returned to the financial world. Far from it. Uncertainty rules. Sterling still treads the low – rather than the high – paths while

Sooner rather than later, George Osborne is going to have to come clean and tell us what he really wants to do with our pensions – the financial vehicles we and our employers painstakingly fund and that in theory should help us live out our retirement in a modicum of comfort. Will it be yet more

When Equitable Life is no more – and it won’t be long before the death bell tolls – there will be a belter of a book to be written about all the shenanigans that have taken place at the mutual. Although the savings institution goes back more than 250 years, it is the last 20

No-one in their right mind would have willingly created the monster that is now the country’s current pension system. It has become the financial Hydra of modern day Britain. Bizarrely, it is deterring most of us from saving for retirement because we are intimidated by its many heads of poisonous anti-saving rules. Governments past and