The Office of Fair Trading has indicated that banks could be making as much as £3.5 billion from penalty fees levied against customers who take their accounts over the authorised overdraft limits. The figure is an estimate released as part of an ongoing investigation by the OFT into the legality and fairness of charges made by banks against ...

Once upon a time it was easy to distinguish between Banks and Building Societies. The latter were where you kept your savings and applied for a mortgage, while the former contained your current account and allowed you to take out personal loans for big buys such as cars. Over the last twenty years, however, Building Societies have demutualised, and the differences have gradually disappeared, l...

There is always plenty of advice in the Press about bank accounts for students, but what should you do if you’re still at school and want to open a current account? You may well have a Saturday job which requires a bank account for your wages to be paid into or you may just want the convenience of being able to use a debit card for shopping or withdrawing cash from an ATM. It should be...

Education is a word made more famous by Tony Blair than any other Prime Minister. It now seems that education is the leading sector in this country in terms of finance. A report from the British Council this week shows that the education sector in the UK is worth more to the export economy than the banking world and the automotive in...

A simple glance through a newspaper stand is likely to be greeted with a barrage of confusing financial terms and grandiose numbers. Peppered with jargon such as hedge funds, credit derivatives and sub-prime and complemented by shock titles such as “Stocks lower as jitters continue” (BBC) “Credit Squeeze gives lenders indigestion” (Daily Telegraph) and “Late Sell-Off Hits Wa...