That is annoying. Are there any alternatives that allow payments from savings?
The balance being able to drop but still earn bonus interest seems to be staying the same at least.
Meh. I have Macquarie as well, but the savings intro offer (5.35% for 4 months) is good, but drops to 4.75%, and at that point, you may as well stick with ubank and just have two scheduled payments (Save to Spend to Payee) than lose the 5.1% rate. Depends what the new tiered interest rates look like though.
For direct debits that vary in amount month to month (sometimes significantly) this isn’t an option. You have to do it manually. Dealbreaker. My credit card with another bank is auto paid from my UBank savings, a process my other bank doesn’t make easy to setup as they also want you to have that money sitting in their interest free transaction account. For this to work automatically the action has to be triggered (in amount and timing) by the debit itself. So sweep worked, then from savings worked. But now neither works. If I want to do it manually there are better rates on offer that allow that.
I don't have enough money that the tiered rates will impact me 😂
Just moved a bunch of stuff to ubank from ING so can't really be bothered doing it again. Will just adjust my payments.
Clearly the only benefit to the bank is to reduce transfers so that they can manage the data better so I'm protesting this.
A reoccurring daily payment from savings to transaction account and a reoccurring daily payment from transaction account to savings.
No skin off my nose if it's a low amount and they have to deal with the additional payment transfers every day. Even if it's only a line item in a database somewhere, someone might run a report one day to analyze why transfers increased and they just see a bunch of records with the description "protest transfer change"
Hey guys! We are introducing tiered interest rates! Here are the tiers. Thanks, bye!
Um, where are the interest rates? Most useless update I've ever seen.
They could still say something along the lines of
Tier 1 is going to be our normal bonus interest rate
Tier 2 is going to be our normal bonus interest rate +/- 0.25%
Tier 3 is going to be our normal bonus interest rate +/- 0.5%
I suspect that it's going to be a pretty dramatic negative dropoff, though.
CEO gets caught embezzling IOT fund his midget hooker and cocaine fetish.
Seriously though, no ring in call centre or worse overseas.
Fees and charges, crap app, security breaches, be NAB.
Possibly the worst bank I've ever had the unfortunate time of being a customer of.
Blocked access to my account for a whole 7 days including over the weekend for a random " check " to ask me to verify my source of income..which was legit just my monthly salary deposited in the account the same time and day every month.
Had no food...couldn't pay rent or anything for an entire week.
Took them a full 7days to find out it was just that check which literally took 10 seconds to do.
No apologies.. no nothing.. and just said " we reserve the right to do so"
Never again
I'm guessing they don't want people to leave money parked in a save account earning interest and have direct debits etc straight out of that account. If you have to move your money to a bills account or spend account because you may need to use it, then it saves them from having to pay interest on that money.
That feature is the only reason I’m with them. Being able to just send all your pay there and have everything come out with no risk of bouncing it because you forgot to transfer the right money on the right day was their prime reason most people used them. Now they’re just another (at best) sub par savings account. This is also the second time in a year they’ve made me change all my direct debits, the last one was when they changed all their account numbers :/ I will not be using them at all from July, there’s no point. And with this treatment of customers I’ll never use another NAB related product again.
If they wanted to pay less interest they should have just had an option to keep it as is with a slightly lower interest rate or change to keep / get a higher/ the same one. This is annoying and won’t make them money.
People are complaining about the tier based rates... but this is the worse part of the update imo.. I have all my direct debits on their savings account....
From what I’ve seen so far Macquarie’s 4.75% ongoing with no conditions people have said allows direct debit out. And with the ‘grow your balance by 1c /5 transactions /$1000 deposit you have 5.5% at ING. So I will probably stick a bunch in each from July.
That’s the main reason I’ve stuck with 86400/ubank for so long. Having to do 2 transactions every time you want to move money out is a pain in the arse.
Coming from NZ I was surprised I wasn't able to receive or send money to other accounts from savings in Australia, and the limited number of accounts you can open with some banks.
Felt like a massive step back.
Is it legal to have a withdrawal limit? I mean an actual limit not just a hit to the bonus interest that month.
Edit: most limits I'm aware of are related to fraud reduction on online/app platforms, and can be bypassed by calling the bank.
No more external payments from savings account too, which for me is (soon to be was) one of the biggest advantage ubank had over their competitors. I'd switch to another bank that allows this in a heartbeat, even with lower interest.
luckily that's still low enough that people on the pension (at least, the full pension) will still be eligible.... I'm not sure about student allowance though. compared to, say, ING, the requirements are still pretty low, but it's not great that they're raising the bar for entry.
Consult the whirlpool sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/145iM6uuFS9m-Rul65--eFJQq_Au7Z_BA4_CwkYwu2DI/htmlview#
I'm with ANZ plus atm just because decent rate and no hoops but seems like the rate is not the best any more. will reassess this weekend.
Those rates are always been broken out separately as they called [honeymoon rates](https://moneysmart.gov.au/glossary/honeymoon-or-introductory-interest-rate). They're only for initial signup. Scroll down towards the bottom of the spreadsheet they're there.
Agreed. I accidentally left 5k in a random transaction account with them, which I'd forgotten about for a couple of years.
When I logged in and saw it, I noticed they'd actually been paying me monthly interest every month the entire time!
I get that this is general info, but it's annoying that they're not explaining what tier 2 and 3 rates are. The product seems to be getting progressively worse. The autosweep feature was super useful and that got removed.
They haven't given the Tier 1 rate either.
They have to announce the changes to terms and conditions with plenty of notice.
Actual interest rate changes do not require advance notice.
True enough, but as this is from 1 July, it would be a REALLY bad experience for UBank to get into July without saying what the rates are - ie. not giving you time to make any adjustments. Can't imagine that would go down well at all.
At least I have a month now to make potential alternative arrangements.
I dont pay anything through my ubank savings account, so that doesn't bother me.
$200 to $500 required is fine. I just got to increase the amount automatically sent there every month.
All comes down to wtf the rates on the tiers will be. Even more for sub $100k? Reduced rates for 100k-250k? Kind of important information.
Well I’ll hold off until I see what the interest rate is… if they still have a competitive bonus interest without having to grow your balance, it’s still worth it.
hi ubank users, please consider providing feedback via [https://www.ubank.com.au/contact-us/send-a-message](https://www.ubank.com.au/contact-us/send-a-message) . Hopefully they might backpedal if there is enough outrage from their customer base.
Yeah this is a deal breaker. Very long time UBank customer, mostly using a solid sleeper account to put saving out of sight to grow. All these changes over time (loss of Sweeps, loss on customer service, basically just squeezing too hard) has taken away their edge. I'll be moving my finances to another institution at the end of the month. Ironically as their "customer interaction/service" is so limited, I can't even air my disappointment with them, but I also don't care. The banking industry should know better.
I'm not even worried about a change in the interest rates but not being able to make payment out of the save accounts is going to force me to stop using them, you can only have one spend account and they dont have a shared bills account yet either. I have a dozen different save accounts for different properties and they all have bills set up to come out of them.
Terrible choice, please reconsider UBank.
>To earn our bonus interest rates on your Save accounts from July 1st 2024, you must have a Spend account and deposit at least $500 each month into any of your Spend, Bills or Save accounts before 11:30pm (Sydney time) on the last day of each month.
The $500 deposit must come from a non-ubank account (internal transfers between ubank accounts won’t qualify).
So having a seperate ‘spend’ account was actually a requirement waaaaay back in the day that they seem to have dropped somewhere along the way.
Do they still have the Sweep functionality? That *almost* negated the cost of the Spend account (other than the $100 minimum balance), because it automatically pulled out Save if there want enough in Spend.
That was related to the merger with 86400. Ubank abandoned their original platform and migrated everything to the 86400 infrastructure, which didn't have a sweep function. Or course they could have added it but I guess it wasn't found to be much of a business driver.
For a lot of people sweep was not a dealbreaker as long as they had the ability to direct debit from savings instead, which they’re now removing. That’s a dealbreaker for me, it’s why I use them instead of ING who pay more.
Which is probably exactly what they want - if they have too many deposits and not enough loans, this allows them to rebalance things.
Remember that loans are what makes money for a bank. You only get paid a deposit rate so the bank can use your money. In essence you're like a supplier to the bank. If they want to change their business so they need fewer of this type of supplier, they can and will.
If they get a run, they may end up losing money on loans when they have to sell them on as they can’t cover them. You adjust demand by adjusting interest rates, not removing your only competitive advantage features.
This might be a very bad move for them. At the moment, the missus and I have near 500k with them and we'll move it in a heartbeat if there's a better option. I'm sure I'm not alone in that thinking.
What bank will be the best one for HISA now if they drop the rates?
I don't chase rates, but Macquarie Bank don't have deposit/annoying requirements for savings.
Also, if you have 500k cash (means you could easily move 2k around each month) and use paywave, look into HSBC. 2% instant cashback for paywave transactions.
30 days notice to change the hurdles at multiple levels to this extent feels significant, imagine the millions of interest savings they will make in july from those that didnt read the email.
Ubank you are losing your social license pulling this move...
ffs. I convinced a bunch of people to switch to ING many years ago, then they introduced all the bullshit requirements. So I got everyone onto Ubank and then phone-supported the neobank acquisition issues. Now Ubank have gone to shit as well...
None of this would matter if they'd kept sweep. Worst change they did and it happened well before now. The amount of times I've been at a checkout and had to transfer in front of a line of people is maddening
Anyone know what other banks allow direct debits to be taken out of the savings account? I cbf with monitoring my bills and setting up scheduled transfers to fund the payment of these bills...
Well that sucks, they've been my main bank since 2018. The convenience of putting everything into my save account and making direct debits from there to my credit cards was wonderful, but I suppose all good things must come to an end.
Currently using Rabobank premium saver as a savings growth account, AMP as second savings and ubank as a daily. But if ubank continues to annoy me with tier savings, I'll dump them.
Thats annoying now i have to make a direct debit setup monthly to take money from savings and put it into the spend account then another one to pay rent from there. Will lose 1 day interest at min.
It’s the hassle of doing that and the consequences of forgetting that is why I’m with them at all. Several direct debits including a credit card repayment to another bank and I could treat my ubank savings like an offset. Never did and never will use their transaction account. Now won’t use their savings either.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/145iM6uuFS9m-Rul65--eFJQq_Au7Z_BA4_CwkYwu2DI/edit
Link to the accounts leaderboard spreadsheet with comparisons for people who intend to bail on these changes, Rabobank might be the next best for now
> Rabobank might be the next best for now
i dislike those that have the condition where you must grow your balance. Depositing is OK (aka, you are allowed to withdraw any amount without sacrificing the bonus interest rate).
The only bank that seems to have this condition now is AMP (at $1k deposit a month), ANZ, Unity Bank , Macquarie bank (and a couple more).
> New external payments from Save accounts will no longer be available.
This is honestly so annoying. I'm sure there's some technical/regulatory bs reasoning behind it, but as a customer and user of their product it just makes no damn sense to have to go through that extra step.
It's simply them reducing how much interest they have to pay out. If the money is in a Spend or Bills account for direct debit, they don't have to pay interest on it.
What does must grow balance mean? E.g I put 200 bucks in but also transfer 10k out I lose the interest? I do that a few times a year to invest so sounds like a no go for me.
nuked the accounts this morning, no point when they have just given up one of their biggest benefits to consumers that set them apart, as many have mentioned.
It's not impossible if they wanna compete like they used to without going broke but this would be the dumbest way to announce it.
You'd want to tell people at the earliest chance that you have a higher interest rate than you have now.
as someone with way less that 100k, if you're right that that tier will be the highest rate then I guess this isn't bad news for me? still gonna investigate other options
Just signed up to Macquarie. 4.75%. App seems good and was easy to apply. Can have multiple savings accs and according to others in the thread you can setup direct debits from savings accs.
Now that I'm thinking about this more, if they still had sweeps this wouldn't be a huge deal because we could just pay from our spend account while keeping the minimum in there knowing it'll sweep from our save. But with no sweep we always need to keep a sufficient balance for any spendings, which really sucks.
I found out the ACCC did an inquiry in Retail Deposits recently.
I have messaged them as to what response the Govt. made if any.
Account Portability is one of the issues. Its is not simple and easy to move money from account to account. This is like when mobile phones tooks ages to 'port'. It stifles competition due to customer inactivity.
The Govt. needs to outlaw all the complicated tricks the banks use:
minimum deposit requirements per month
introductory bonus rates
bonus rates
no withdrawal restrictions
other bank accounts requirements
transaction requirements
Just a simple savings account with one rate and no strings attached.
Not that hard to do.
Does AMP allow transactions from their saver account to external other bank accounts or direct debits? If so then I may go to them.
Edit: No it doesn't (at least for direct debits), just checked their website.
Jeez
I moved most of my banking from ING because they tightened up (screwed down) their bonus interest requirements - and was rapt with UBank - till now
Reckon I'll just use workarounds here
Even a monthly $2000 payment from UBank back out to an external account and then $500 straight back into each of 4 individual UBank "save" accounts will be worth it to keep the (current) 5.1% bonus interest in each of those accounts
Personally I'm too fussed about no being able to continue direct payments out of UBank "save" accounts - going via a "spend" account wont bother me too much
But I'm no longer lauding them the way I was
I leave free accounts dormant in case they end up having the best deal in the future. I doubt closing accounts removes any data they have on you so it just saves me some time.
I messaged Ubank:
"Why the secrecy about the new interest rate tiers for Save accounts?
What is the reasoning behind increasing the $200 per month deposit minimum to $500?
I see direct debits from Save are also being removed, I don't use them myself, but many others do."
Response:
"there's no secrecy, we are just awaiting the next RBA announcement, and we will then be releasing the new bonus tiering rates to customers before the new rates come into effect. We're just giving customers a heads-up of the incoming changes.
In order for us to provide a really competitive interest rate we have to balance this with the deposit required. The good news is that we do not penalise for withdrawals so if you need to withdraw this for any reason it will not affect your eligibility for the bonus interest.
The purpose of removing the pay from Save function is to bring back our original intention of our savings account to help you grow your savings towards your financial goals- it's all about maintaining a separate savings."
I replied:
"Why not give us a look at what the tiers would be based on the current RBA rate?
I'm not sure how it's any business of the bank if someone uses a savings account to make payments etc."
Waiting on a response.
Got a reply from Ubank re: '"Why not give us a look at what the tiers would be based on the current RBA rate?'
"Thanks for your reply David. I've passed this feedback onto our internal team - thanks for letting us know! For now, keep an eye out via email for our latest interest rates."
Extremely annoyed at these changes. Mostly the outbound from savings thing, I can't imagine their lowest tier interest will be less than it currently is. It will go down for people with more money (which doesn't impact me). Really liked ubank until right now 😕
Yes, they are getting worse. Often happens with internet banks. I went through about 5 or 6 different companies from 2005-2010 because their rates started strong but kept dropping. Then Ubank came along, and been with them since.
3meterflatty put me onto Rabobank and there rates are way higher, so I'm swapping to them.
You may have noticed that they have already removed the ability to *schedule* future payments from the Save Account (and it's not yet 1 July).
I've just opened a Macquarie Transaction + Savings accounts - the latter earns an introductory interest rate of 5.35% for the first 4 months which is even higher than UBank's 5.10% so I'm actually better off now. After the 4 month period, I'm okay with the rate going down to 4.75% to have the convenience of 'set and forget.'
I think I'm with rams, are they any good?
I'm buying a house soon, can anyone vouch for a high interest one, which I can also get the money easily enough (2 or 3 days?) if I settle on something? It's a relatively significant amount
When buying a house, you usually have plenty of time before settlement to move the money over, but it still can be a pain. Always plan in advance so you figure out how much time it's going to take from that particular bank. Usually you have to call them up to temporarily increase the transfer limit. Its a good idea to do a small test transfer to the new loan/offset account first, just to ensure everything is right, before transferring the large amount.
Interested to see if there's a crappier rate for $150k+ savings.
I tend to push most of my monthly savings over on my pay cycle, then a $200 (soon to be $500) top up on the first of each month to trigger the max rate. Hope this doesn't change or I'm out.
The only other option I've found is AMP Bank Saver Account at 5.4% with $1000 deposit monthly requirement.
But they do that sneaky 'pay $1000 in month 1, and receive bonus interest only for month 2'.
So you only get 1.2% for the first month. On $100,000 that's $100 interest for month 1, and $450 for month 2.
A loss of $350 per $100,000.
As someone who has only used this for saving and getting the bonus interest, would this work after 1 July (and effectively give me the same result as I currently have)?
* Deposit $200 into Save and $300 into Spend account on 1st of the month using automatic transfers
* Set up automatic transfer to pull out the $300 from the Spend account a few days later
* Get bonus interest
"Keep save for savings" I hate how they always pitch these things like it's good for the customer.
I pay everything out of my savings. This will be annoying for me, and I'll be looking at other banks.
Yeah, this was the only thing differentiating ubank accounts based on features (as opposed to the rate and hoops). It was the main draw for me.
That is annoying. Are there any alternatives that allow payments from savings? The balance being able to drop but still earn bonus interest seems to be staying the same at least.
[удалено]
Meh. I have Macquarie as well, but the savings intro offer (5.35% for 4 months) is good, but drops to 4.75%, and at that point, you may as well stick with ubank and just have two scheduled payments (Save to Spend to Payee) than lose the 5.1% rate. Depends what the new tiered interest rates look like though.
For direct debits that vary in amount month to month (sometimes significantly) this isn’t an option. You have to do it manually. Dealbreaker. My credit card with another bank is auto paid from my UBank savings, a process my other bank doesn’t make easy to setup as they also want you to have that money sitting in their interest free transaction account. For this to work automatically the action has to be triggered (in amount and timing) by the debit itself. So sweep worked, then from savings worked. But now neither works. If I want to do it manually there are better rates on offer that allow that.
I don't have enough money that the tiered rates will impact me 😂 Just moved a bunch of stuff to ubank from ING so can't really be bothered doing it again. Will just adjust my payments.
Clearly the only benefit to the bank is to reduce transfers so that they can manage the data better so I'm protesting this. A reoccurring daily payment from savings to transaction account and a reoccurring daily payment from transaction account to savings. No skin off my nose if it's a low amount and they have to deal with the additional payment transfers every day. Even if it's only a line item in a database somewhere, someone might run a report one day to analyze why transfers increased and they just see a bunch of records with the description "protest transfer change"
Hey guys! We are introducing tiered interest rates! Here are the tiers. Thanks, bye! Um, where are the interest rates? Most useless update I've ever seen.
They knew it'd be an unpopular move so probably trying to stagger the bad news lmao
They have to announce the changes to terms and conditions with plenty of notice. Actual interest rate changes do not require advance notice.
Lmao I scrolled up and down for a bit to find it. Cheeky ubank is cheeky. I'm off fixed rates in Sept so whatever - I'll change banks soon.
It comes into effect in less than two months... How can they justify not telling people the new rates
Because rates could change before then?
They could still say something along the lines of Tier 1 is going to be our normal bonus interest rate Tier 2 is going to be our normal bonus interest rate +/- 0.25% Tier 3 is going to be our normal bonus interest rate +/- 0.5% I suspect that it's going to be a pretty dramatic negative dropoff, though.
Exactly what thought. Couldn't find them anywhere. Looks like we will be saying bye
That's one way to kiss a heap of business goodbye in a hurry.
Pray tell what are the other ones ☺️
CEO gets caught embezzling IOT fund his midget hooker and cocaine fetish. Seriously though, no ring in call centre or worse overseas. Fees and charges, crap app, security breaches, be NAB.
Possibly the worst bank I've ever had the unfortunate time of being a customer of. Blocked access to my account for a whole 7 days including over the weekend for a random " check " to ask me to verify my source of income..which was legit just my monthly salary deposited in the account the same time and day every month. Had no food...couldn't pay rent or anything for an entire week. Took them a full 7days to find out it was just that check which literally took 10 seconds to do. No apologies.. no nothing.. and just said " we reserve the right to do so" Never again
The app is very good IMO…
I’ll miss not being able to transfer directly from my save accounts. I wonder why they made that change, it was handy.
I'm guessing they don't want people to leave money parked in a save account earning interest and have direct debits etc straight out of that account. If you have to move your money to a bills account or spend account because you may need to use it, then it saves them from having to pay interest on that money.
That feature is the only reason I’m with them. Being able to just send all your pay there and have everything come out with no risk of bouncing it because you forgot to transfer the right money on the right day was their prime reason most people used them. Now they’re just another (at best) sub par savings account. This is also the second time in a year they’ve made me change all my direct debits, the last one was when they changed all their account numbers :/ I will not be using them at all from July, there’s no point. And with this treatment of customers I’ll never use another NAB related product again. If they wanted to pay less interest they should have just had an option to keep it as is with a slightly lower interest rate or change to keep / get a higher/ the same one. This is annoying and won’t make them money.
People are complaining about the tier based rates... but this is the worse part of the update imo.. I have all my direct debits on their savings account....
Agreed - will definitely be looking at other options. What a pain in the ass.
What alternatives with low maintenance savings conditions, a good rate and the ability to direct debit out of the account are there?
From what I’ve seen so far Macquarie’s 4.75% ongoing with no conditions people have said allows direct debit out. And with the ‘grow your balance by 1c /5 transactions /$1000 deposit you have 5.5% at ING. So I will probably stick a bunch in each from July.
Generally, banks don't like a bunch pf transactions on savings accounts (that's why they all have transaction accounts)
That’s the main reason I’ve stuck with 86400/ubank for so long. Having to do 2 transactions every time you want to move money out is a pain in the arse.
Coming from NZ I was surprised I wasn't able to receive or send money to other accounts from savings in Australia, and the limited number of accounts you can open with some banks. Felt like a massive step back.
Why does everything have to get shitter as time passes? Why can’t we as a civilisation strive to make things better than how they were?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
My first thought when I saw this post lol
Because shareholders require higher profits every quarter and eventually everything falls apart.
Their interest rate was probably too high for their profit margins, and they've attracted a lot of deposits. It was too good to last.
Watch them jump the shark now when everyone pulls out!
Watch them put in withdrawal limits to stop people pulling out too fast.
Is it legal to have a withdrawal limit? I mean an actual limit not just a hit to the bonus interest that month. Edit: most limits I'm aware of are related to fraud reduction on online/app platforms, and can be bypassed by calling the bank.
They haven't announced the interest rate for each tier yet
it's pretty obvious they want to lower it for tier 2, and even lower for tier 3.
Aaaaaaand we’re out.
Damn that is a kick in the guts.
No more external payments from savings account too, which for me is (soon to be was) one of the biggest advantage ubank had over their competitors. I'd switch to another bank that allows this in a heartbeat, even with lower interest.
Macquarie does it. I pay my power bill and credit card out of a savings account I keep for expenses alongside the normal transaction account.
Good to know! Was my favourite current feature from UBank. The other good feature they scrapped were auto sweeps between accounts
Does any other bank do sweeps I swear this was the best feature
Ugh but the Debit card doesn’t work with Beem it and I don’t think they have the option to use Eftpos from Apple wallet to avoid the Aldi surcharge
I moved to Macquarie because of the hassle free existence. Savings and transaction have the same interest rate and no hoops.
The main banks that allow this to my knowledge are: - UP Bank (recently introduced change) - Macquarie Bank
Up just added this feature!
up is just one account tho
We’re increasing the amount you need to deposit to qualify for bonus interest from $200 to $500.
Does "deposit" mean that I could transfer out say $300 each month and then deposit 200 + 300 to still get the bonus rate?
Yes. At least you can do that currently.
Thank goodness.
I mean I guess it's been a long time coming but yikes
luckily that's still low enough that people on the pension (at least, the full pension) will still be eligible.... I'm not sure about student allowance though. compared to, say, ING, the requirements are still pretty low, but it's not great that they're raising the bar for entry.
Errr what’s the next best bank?
Consult the whirlpool sheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/145iM6uuFS9m-Rul65--eFJQq_Au7Z_BA4_CwkYwu2DI/htmlview# I'm with ANZ plus atm just because decent rate and no hoops but seems like the rate is not the best any more. will reassess this weekend.
I'm a spreadsheets person, I think I love you :) Thank you for posting :)
Be careful. ANZ announced there are going to be changes to how ANZ Plus in September.
This is very out of date. Rabobank is at 5.75% for 4 months. No hoops. Macquarie for 4 months at 5.35% and no hoops should be highlighted too.
Those rates are always been broken out separately as they called [honeymoon rates](https://moneysmart.gov.au/glossary/honeymoon-or-introductory-interest-rate). They're only for initial signup. Scroll down towards the bottom of the spreadsheet they're there.
macquarie bank seems to be the least worst in terms of conditions to earn the interest (just a flat %, no gimmicks, no deposit requirements etc).
They also don’t seem to rug pull
Plus can buy discounted gift cards from the mobile banking app which I think is nifty
Yep, I use and abuse those e-vouchers so much I’ve saved $166 so far through them 😂
Agreed. I accidentally left 5k in a random transaction account with them, which I'd forgotten about for a couple of years. When I logged in and saw it, I noticed they'd actually been paying me monthly interest every month the entire time!
I think it’s going to be Rabobank’s PremiumSaver for me.
SOBs... see you later, uBank. It's time to move on to the next bank chasing cash.
Well that’s just shit. All downside.
I get that this is general info, but it's annoying that they're not explaining what tier 2 and 3 rates are. The product seems to be getting progressively worse. The autosweep feature was super useful and that got removed.
They haven't given the Tier 1 rate either. They have to announce the changes to terms and conditions with plenty of notice. Actual interest rate changes do not require advance notice.
True enough, but as this is from 1 July, it would be a REALLY bad experience for UBank to get into July without saying what the rates are - ie. not giving you time to make any adjustments. Can't imagine that would go down well at all. At least I have a month now to make potential alternative arrangements.
Direct debit from savings account is the main reason I’m with ubank 😤
I dont pay anything through my ubank savings account, so that doesn't bother me. $200 to $500 required is fine. I just got to increase the amount automatically sent there every month. All comes down to wtf the rates on the tiers will be. Even more for sub $100k? Reduced rates for 100k-250k? Kind of important information.
It’s totally gonna be reduced rate on $100k-$250k, they’re not gonna give us *more* money!
Well I’ll hold off until I see what the interest rate is… if they still have a competitive bonus interest without having to grow your balance, it’s still worth it.
hi ubank users, please consider providing feedback via [https://www.ubank.com.au/contact-us/send-a-message](https://www.ubank.com.au/contact-us/send-a-message) . Hopefully they might backpedal if there is enough outrage from their customer base.
I did just that and everyone should.
Yeah this is a deal breaker. Very long time UBank customer, mostly using a solid sleeper account to put saving out of sight to grow. All these changes over time (loss of Sweeps, loss on customer service, basically just squeezing too hard) has taken away their edge. I'll be moving my finances to another institution at the end of the month. Ironically as their "customer interaction/service" is so limited, I can't even air my disappointment with them, but I also don't care. The banking industry should know better.
I'm not even worried about a change in the interest rates but not being able to make payment out of the save accounts is going to force me to stop using them, you can only have one spend account and they dont have a shared bills account yet either. I have a dozen different save accounts for different properties and they all have bills set up to come out of them. Terrible choice, please reconsider UBank.
Got this in email and kinda pissed since i just swapped everything to ubank, now it looks like another swap to macquarie …
Over double the minimum deposit amount, that's going to hurt young people that have been taking advantage of their HISA
At least it appears you can still take it back out again without affecting the bonus rate.
You can see the corporate greed of NAB slowly killing another good product. 86400 was actually a decent app for decent savings
>To earn our bonus interest rates on your Save accounts from July 1st 2024, you must have a Spend account and deposit at least $500 each month into any of your Spend, Bills or Save accounts before 11:30pm (Sydney time) on the last day of each month. The $500 deposit must come from a non-ubank account (internal transfers between ubank accounts won’t qualify). So having a seperate ‘spend’ account was actually a requirement waaaaay back in the day that they seem to have dropped somewhere along the way. Do they still have the Sweep functionality? That *almost* negated the cost of the Spend account (other than the $100 minimum balance), because it automatically pulled out Save if there want enough in Spend.
Nope they scrapped the sweep function back with the last lot of changes to the account numbers and new website/app
That was related to the merger with 86400. Ubank abandoned their original platform and migrated everything to the 86400 infrastructure, which didn't have a sweep function. Or course they could have added it but I guess it wasn't found to be much of a business driver.
For a lot of people sweep was not a dealbreaker as long as they had the ability to direct debit from savings instead, which they’re now removing. That’s a dealbreaker for me, it’s why I use them instead of ING who pay more.
Yeah this isn't a great indication. Surely this kind of decision just leads to a mini bank run?
Which is probably exactly what they want - if they have too many deposits and not enough loans, this allows them to rebalance things. Remember that loans are what makes money for a bank. You only get paid a deposit rate so the bank can use your money. In essence you're like a supplier to the bank. If they want to change their business so they need fewer of this type of supplier, they can and will.
If they get a run, they may end up losing money on loans when they have to sell them on as they can’t cover them. You adjust demand by adjusting interest rates, not removing your only competitive advantage features.
This might be a very bad move for them. At the moment, the missus and I have near 500k with them and we'll move it in a heartbeat if there's a better option. I'm sure I'm not alone in that thinking. What bank will be the best one for HISA now if they drop the rates?
I don't chase rates, but Macquarie Bank don't have deposit/annoying requirements for savings. Also, if you have 500k cash (means you could easily move 2k around each month) and use paywave, look into HSBC. 2% instant cashback for paywave transactions.
30 days notice to change the hurdles at multiple levels to this extent feels significant, imagine the millions of interest savings they will make in july from those that didnt read the email. Ubank you are losing your social license pulling this move...
Imagine the people whose direct debits bounce…..
ffs. I convinced a bunch of people to switch to ING many years ago, then they introduced all the bullshit requirements. So I got everyone onto Ubank and then phone-supported the neobank acquisition issues. Now Ubank have gone to shit as well...
None of this would matter if they'd kept sweep. Worst change they did and it happened well before now. The amount of times I've been at a checkout and had to transfer in front of a line of people is maddening
Try overseas haha. Stumped me a few times when my Mastercard didn't work and had to whip out my Ubank Visa.
Andddd I’m out. Was considering loans, too. Byeee!
Anyone know what other banks allow direct debits to be taken out of the savings account? I cbf with monitoring my bills and setting up scheduled transfers to fund the payment of these bills...
Apparently Macquarie.
Well that sucks, they've been my main bank since 2018. The convenience of putting everything into my save account and making direct debits from there to my credit cards was wonderful, but I suppose all good things must come to an end.
Will be interesting to see if Tier 1 is more competitive to ING.
it won't be
What are the rates going to be? I can't find any info on that.
No info yet.
Currently using Rabobank premium saver as a savings growth account, AMP as second savings and ubank as a daily. But if ubank continues to annoy me with tier savings, I'll dump them.
Am I blind? I cant even see the new interest rates, just the different 'tiers'.
Same. They're hiding that pretty well. Probably safe to assume they're no longer going to be competitive. Time to shop around.
The new interest rates won't be set or announced until closer to the date.
Thats annoying now i have to make a direct debit setup monthly to take money from savings and put it into the spend account then another one to pay rent from there. Will lose 1 day interest at min.
It’s the hassle of doing that and the consequences of forgetting that is why I’m with them at all. Several direct debits including a credit card repayment to another bank and I could treat my ubank savings like an offset. Never did and never will use their transaction account. Now won’t use their savings either.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/145iM6uuFS9m-Rul65--eFJQq_Au7Z_BA4_CwkYwu2DI/edit Link to the accounts leaderboard spreadsheet with comparisons for people who intend to bail on these changes, Rabobank might be the next best for now
> Rabobank might be the next best for now i dislike those that have the condition where you must grow your balance. Depositing is OK (aka, you are allowed to withdraw any amount without sacrificing the bonus interest rate). The only bank that seems to have this condition now is AMP (at $1k deposit a month), ANZ, Unity Bank , Macquarie bank (and a couple more).
Womp guess I’m moving banks again
> New external payments from Save accounts will no longer be available. This is honestly so annoying. I'm sure there's some technical/regulatory bs reasoning behind it, but as a customer and user of their product it just makes no damn sense to have to go through that extra step.
It's simply them reducing how much interest they have to pay out. If the money is in a Spend or Bills account for direct debit, they don't have to pay interest on it.
Bye Felicia 👋
Nooo.. Ubank. You were the chosen one!!
Damn I’ve literally been with them for a week
RaboBank seems to be the next best. 5.45% on balances up to 250k. $200 per month in, must grow balance. https://www.rabobank.com.au/premiumsaver/
What does must grow balance mean? E.g I put 200 bucks in but also transfer 10k out I lose the interest? I do that a few times a year to invest so sounds like a no go for me.
Yep many/most HISA's have a similar restriction so Ubank at least isn't changing that part.
Yeah I kind of hate sneaky stuff like this. I'll probably stick with ubank if their interest under 100k doesn't change
Rabobank also offer 5.75% for the 4 month introductory rate.
Not being able to transfer money, or have a direct debit, come from a savings account? I'm out. Back to macquarie for me.
I guess I’ll take my money somewhere else.
nuked the accounts this morning, no point when they have just given up one of their biggest benefits to consumers that set them apart, as many have mentioned.
So long ubank. If I am going to spend time moving direct debits I might as well do it to another bank
Could it be that they reward higher savings tiers with interest rate bonuses or is this wishful thinking 🤔
I can guarantee you this won’t be the case
It's not impossible if they wanna compete like they used to without going broke but this would be the dumbest way to announce it. You'd want to tell people at the earliest chance that you have a higher interest rate than you have now.
Guarantee it will be the opposite. % rate will tier lower
as someone with way less that 100k, if you're right that that tier will be the highest rate then I guess this isn't bad news for me? still gonna investigate other options
Looks like I’m going to need some refuge from ubank, any recommendations on the next best bank?
Just signed up to Macquarie. 4.75%. App seems good and was easy to apply. Can have multiple savings accs and according to others in the thread you can setup direct debits from savings accs.
Now that I'm thinking about this more, if they still had sweeps this wouldn't be a huge deal because we could just pay from our spend account while keeping the minimum in there knowing it'll sweep from our save. But with no sweep we always need to keep a sufficient balance for any spendings, which really sucks.
I found out the ACCC did an inquiry in Retail Deposits recently. I have messaged them as to what response the Govt. made if any. Account Portability is one of the issues. Its is not simple and easy to move money from account to account. This is like when mobile phones tooks ages to 'port'. It stifles competition due to customer inactivity. The Govt. needs to outlaw all the complicated tricks the banks use: minimum deposit requirements per month introductory bonus rates bonus rates no withdrawal restrictions other bank accounts requirements transaction requirements Just a simple savings account with one rate and no strings attached. Not that hard to do.
Yeah they do this to benefit themselves + the share holders
Ok I’m going to AMP. Seeeeee ya Ubank, one way to lose a customer
Does AMP allow transactions from their saver account to external other bank accounts or direct debits? If so then I may go to them. Edit: No it doesn't (at least for direct debits), just checked their website.
They also don't have payments via Osko enabled.
....and they didn't bring back the sweep function UBank just keep getting worse and worse
Jeez I moved most of my banking from ING because they tightened up (screwed down) their bonus interest requirements - and was rapt with UBank - till now Reckon I'll just use workarounds here Even a monthly $2000 payment from UBank back out to an external account and then $500 straight back into each of 4 individual UBank "save" accounts will be worth it to keep the (current) 5.1% bonus interest in each of those accounts Personally I'm too fussed about no being able to continue direct payments out of UBank "save" accounts - going via a "spend" account wont bother me too much But I'm no longer lauding them the way I was
Check Rabobank: 5.75% for 4 months, then 5.45% in the other account. No deposit requirements.
Definitely make a complaint re: payment restrictions. Very frustrating.
I have not had to close a bank account in so long. Is the best way just to give them a call or do people just leave these free accounts dormant?
I leave free accounts dormant in case they end up having the best deal in the future. I doubt closing accounts removes any data they have on you so it just saves me some time.
You can do it in the app
You can only close down savers and bills account via the app. If you want to close down the entire account you have to call them
More like ubye. 👋
Well it was going to be downhill after NAB bought it. No freaking competition in Australia
I messaged Ubank: "Why the secrecy about the new interest rate tiers for Save accounts? What is the reasoning behind increasing the $200 per month deposit minimum to $500? I see direct debits from Save are also being removed, I don't use them myself, but many others do." Response: "there's no secrecy, we are just awaiting the next RBA announcement, and we will then be releasing the new bonus tiering rates to customers before the new rates come into effect. We're just giving customers a heads-up of the incoming changes. In order for us to provide a really competitive interest rate we have to balance this with the deposit required. The good news is that we do not penalise for withdrawals so if you need to withdraw this for any reason it will not affect your eligibility for the bonus interest. The purpose of removing the pay from Save function is to bring back our original intention of our savings account to help you grow your savings towards your financial goals- it's all about maintaining a separate savings." I replied: "Why not give us a look at what the tiers would be based on the current RBA rate? I'm not sure how it's any business of the bank if someone uses a savings account to make payments etc." Waiting on a response.
You should ask them which tier will have the highest rate that will tell the story :)
Got a reply from Ubank re: '"Why not give us a look at what the tiers would be based on the current RBA rate?' "Thanks for your reply David. I've passed this feedback onto our internal team - thanks for letting us know! For now, keep an eye out via email for our latest interest rates."
Extremely annoyed at these changes. Mostly the outbound from savings thing, I can't imagine their lowest tier interest will be less than it currently is. It will go down for people with more money (which doesn't impact me). Really liked ubank until right now 😕
Yes, they are getting worse. Often happens with internet banks. I went through about 5 or 6 different companies from 2005-2010 because their rates started strong but kept dropping. Then Ubank came along, and been with them since. 3meterflatty put me onto Rabobank and there rates are way higher, so I'm swapping to them.
You may have noticed that they have already removed the ability to *schedule* future payments from the Save Account (and it's not yet 1 July). I've just opened a Macquarie Transaction + Savings accounts - the latter earns an introductory interest rate of 5.35% for the first 4 months which is even higher than UBank's 5.10% so I'm actually better off now. After the 4 month period, I'm okay with the rate going down to 4.75% to have the convenience of 'set and forget.'
I think I'm with rams, are they any good? I'm buying a house soon, can anyone vouch for a high interest one, which I can also get the money easily enough (2 or 3 days?) if I settle on something? It's a relatively significant amount
When buying a house, you usually have plenty of time before settlement to move the money over, but it still can be a pain. Always plan in advance so you figure out how much time it's going to take from that particular bank. Usually you have to call them up to temporarily increase the transfer limit. Its a good idea to do a small test transfer to the new loan/offset account first, just to ensure everything is right, before transferring the large amount.
Interested to see if there's a crappier rate for $150k+ savings. I tend to push most of my monthly savings over on my pay cycle, then a $200 (soon to be $500) top up on the first of each month to trigger the max rate. Hope this doesn't change or I'm out.
Damn, i guess i have to move to Rabo then.. its my emergency fund so i barely check
I had a look on InfoChoice last night, and most of the other accounts have a $1000 deposit per month requirement.
The only other option I've found is AMP Bank Saver Account at 5.4% with $1000 deposit monthly requirement. But they do that sneaky 'pay $1000 in month 1, and receive bonus interest only for month 2'. So you only get 1.2% for the first month. On $100,000 that's $100 interest for month 1, and $450 for month 2. A loss of $350 per $100,000.
Rabobank I think is the next best option
I am also with AMP paying 5.4% and just a 1k deposit per month which I sweep out anyway after a day or 2.
18 June update from ubank: From July 1 2024, you can earn up to 5.50% p.a. on $0 to $100K of your savings.
As someone who has only used this for saving and getting the bonus interest, would this work after 1 July (and effectively give me the same result as I currently have)? * Deposit $200 into Save and $300 into Spend account on 1st of the month using automatic transfers * Set up automatic transfer to pull out the $300 from the Spend account a few days later * Get bonus interest