Very interesting but how will the system cope when the tenant of the house you own in the UK is also a Barclatcard customer?
I can see it is worth a try if you have ticked the paperless option correspondence and as for an email address then gmail.com for example could be anywhere, not just France.
As long as there isnt a blip in the system at some future point when your tenant gets your monthly statement!!!
Why should that be a problem? For example I used to live in the top floor flat of a three-flat three storey house. For all I know the other occupants of the other flats (same address) could have had Barclaycards as well. It’s true it has in the past been a problem for multi-tenanted properties if someone has a CCJ against them and the credit rating agencies pick that up and suddenly no-one in the house can get credit. But I think they’ve got more sophisticated these days.
Almost certainly not - but there have been instances of credit scores being affected by other high risk/low score people living at the same address.
We have used my in-laws address for all our bank accounts/mortgages/credit cards without any problem since 2005 and by doing that we have a continuous financial footprint that should make it easy to pass any credit checks.
My Barclaycard has a UK address but they say there is a Barclays Bank account with a foreign address. 4 years ago I fell out with Barclays Bank and closed all our accounts, or thought I had they had me going round the bend with their inefficiency to do a simple task. Anyway they closed them in dribs and drabs the last one supposedly whilst I was actually on the phone to them in 2017 but it seems there is still one remaining with 17p in it, the lovely young woman I spoke to at Barclaycard (after waiting 40 minutes for someone to answer) told me that as she could access the Barclays Bank accounts but she couldn’t close it or change the address on it she said I would have to go into a branch of Barclays Bank to do that. What a palaver.
The letter in March 2019 just stated that the relationship between the UK and the EU may change and that they would let us know if we are affected by this. 18 months later they have with notice that we cannot use our card after 22nd Octoberand that the account will be closed on 20th November. But you must still carry on paying off your debt. No mention of the actual reason why this is happening, so you have to find out why from somewhere else.
The latest letter states that “your residential address must be in one of these countries. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland” Nothing about a billing address or delivery address.
I only use my card for UK purchases and it is payable directly from my UK bank account automatically…
I will probably end up using my daughter’s card details and just pay her instead.
If banks are going to follow suit, then we are all going to be in the mire.
I wonder if building societies are going to do the same., although mine is offshore so I don’t suppose that will be affected.
Will EU nationals with accounts in the EU be affected by this ruling too? Just wondered.
When I moved to France 2 years ago I tried to change my address to my French one online. The system wouldn’t accept it so I contacted them. They told me then that, as soon as I was no longer resident in the UK, I could no longer have a Barclaycard. Not sure if it was directly related to Brexit but there was no indication at the time. Debit cards on UK accounts with a French address are fine but you can’t have a credit card.
You can be a RESIDENT of more than once country, the banks and other organisations will not care. In these days of gross interest being paid (if any), your tax residence is also no longer of interest to them.
We have been out of the UK since 1989 (HK, Indonesia, Oman and other places) and all that time have kept accounts with Barclays and Barclaycard. They have always known we were not UK residents and were happy to send to an “admin” address which is a flat we own and in which our daughter lives.
Up to today nothing has arrived to stop our Barclaycards and we do use them quite a lot generally. The point of this post is just that Barclaycard never cared that we were resident outside the EU for all these years.
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I think the point about the EU Kate is that, as stated in the Telegraph article, the UK banks are facing potentially setting up legal structures for each of the 27 countries in the EU. There obviously will be considerable costs involved in this process, so they are taking the opportunity to withdraw from markets that they consider to be too small / not profitable.
Barclaycard has never cared that we are outside the UK - up until now. Rather than set up a new legal entity in France they have taken the decision to withdraw from the market. However, they also seem to be willing to be pretty relaxed about what it means to be “resident in the UK”. We shall see whether that lasts.
@graham Just to caution (as said earlier in this thread) anyone considering turning to the likes of Revolut and Transferwise, yes they are regulated by the FCA but they are NOT within the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. The later protects the moneys in current and savings accounts of the UK banks up to £85,000 for any individual bank. If you start to use Revolut or Transferwise as a current a/c substitute and they go belly up you will lose everything.
And what if there are no alternatives that are acceptable Graham? At least let people be aware of the risks. eg: I too have my state pension paid into my French bank a/c. Lovely all nice and safe. Well maybe not. There is an exchange rate loss on coming into France. If I have no UK bank a/c and I need sterling, I now have to move some of that state pension back to the UK - so I’ve had a double hit on that money.
At the moment, I am fortunate. I do have a UK bank which looks as if it’s committed to France - HSBC - and at the moment I will continue to have a couple of smaller pensions paid into the UK for when I need the money there.
Also, I’m not sure it’s my role to suggest alternatives. I am not a financial expert/adviser. I just take a personal interest in financial affairs having been a consultant to the sector (so I know where some of the skeletons are!) I copied the Telegraph article which clearly sets out what all the main banks are doing. But at no point can one be certain this will continue - Nat West - business as usual? Really? For example, it was only in 2018 that Barclaycard implied it was committed to France - that didn’t last long.
Financial institutions like Transferwise, which I use and Revolut have no track record. Also there is a big question mark over the accounts which have UK IBAN numbers (which my Transferwise a/c does have). Are they really not subject to the same constraints as an HSBC or a Barclays or a Nat West a/c?
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The “also” implies that you think Revolut and Transferwise aren’t regulated by the FCA - they are, and they make much of it when one asks how secure is our money. But, as always, you have to know what questions to ask. What they don’t say, and certainly aren’t going to volunteer, is that they are NOT regulated by the Prudential Regulation Authority which is part of the Bank of England. It is this organisation which ensures that if a bank goes under its customers are protected.
Can you please edit that and remove the reference to neck winding please?! That is how all arguments start I have found… 
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Article in the Times today about Revolut. If you are with them or think you might be interested in them, read this.
"If someone in your life uses Revolut, you’ve almost certainly heard about it. The financial app, recently named Britain’s fastest-growing technology company by The Sunday Times , inspires the kind of fandom that Apple did in the early days of the iPhone. Look, an app that lets you casually buy US stocks commission-free from your phone! A card that lets you make commission-free international payments using the interbank exchange rate in over 150 currencies! Overseas medical insurance for as little as £1 a day!
For a while, I was one of these enthused customers. Revolut, which has 13 million customers around the world and has been valued at $5.5 billion, truly exposes the poor service, unfair fees and technological tardiness of our high street banks. Everything about it is superior, not least the notification service, which informs you the instant money has moved in your account, whereas a traditional bank can take days to inform you that you’ve accidentally paid £1,000 for two pieces of chicken at Nando’s.
I’m saddened to report, however, that my love for the company, which was originally set up to enable travellers to dodge expensive foreign exchange fees, has since faded. Sapped by an experience where Revolut’s artificial intelligence systems froze my account for more than a week due to “suspicious activity”, I struggled to explain the basics to a series of bots and anonymous, uncomprehending employees at the end of an online support line. And it turns out, my experience is not unusual.
In January this year, The Telegraph reported that dozens of Revolut customers were threatening the digital bank with legal action for leaving them for months without access to their savings, including Dirk De Groot, who had more than £30,000 stuck in a blocked Revolut account. In February, The Sunday Times reported that Revolut mistakenly had frozen the accounts of a French company, trapping €300,000 for six weeks without explanation and leaving it unable to pay staff. In August, the Irish Mail on Sunday reported that a farmer had a crucial €70,000 business transaction to her Revolut account blocked for more than a month. And in February again, it was revealed that unhappy Revolut customers accounted for eight in ten of all grievances about digital banks in the preceding eighteen months made via Resolver, the dispute resolution service, in excess of its 66.4 per cent market share of digital bank customers.
There are, of course, perfectly sensible reasons why any bank would need to freeze funds or investigate sources of funds in any account. Money-laundering scandals have weighed on banks in recent years. There are also practical reasons why a bank can’t always engage with complaints: sometimes the customers complaining loudly are actual fraudsters and the matter has been referred to the police. Moreover, Revolut is not the only company out there relying on AI-driven compliance systems and algorithms to identify fraud: like most people, I have been subjected to similar checks by traditional banks.
The difference between these banks and Revolut is that they eventually produced a real human being to help, realising that when a customer unnecessarily loses access to their money, it is not merely a bad customer service experience — one that can mean them not being able to clothe their families, pay their staff or buy a home — and appreciating that a glut of these stories can quickly undermine trust in your service. There’s a reason why governments cannot afford to let banks fail and dread runs on banks: they play a central role in the economy.
In defence, Revolut tells me that around a quarter of queries are quickly resolved by its support bot, that it has more than 1,000 full-time staff in the areas of customer support, compliance and financial crime in London, Krakow, Porto and Berlin and that “customers can easily speak with a human agent in multiple languages where queries are more complex”. But this is not my experience, nor that of many others. In turn, this over-reliance on bots and tech reflects a philosophy where one of Britain’s fastest-growing private companies sees itself a technology business, another Deliveroo or Amazon, expanding as quickly as possible to defeat the opposition, rather than anything resembling a bank."
My experience of Revolut has been excellent over past 3 years.
I use it for currency transfers and day to day banking but not savings.
Yes it is different from a traditional bank - but in many ways in a very positive way.
If Credit Agricole up their game and copied some of the excellent Revolut practices I may have used them more.
Today’s Money Box, broadcast at 12.00 BST
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Are you able to copy and paste the article please Graham? I don’t have a Times subscription and I can’t read beyond the first few lines unless I sign up.
Good to see that the media is beginning to take notice.