Creation Financial Services bashing

[John]

Dan Hurley wrote:

always paid off in full (using a cashback credit card) why they allowed that is beyond me? I don’t believe I broke the spirit of any rules let alone the letter of them.

You don’t think paying a credit card with a credit card is breaking the “spirit of the rules”?

[Dan Hurley]

John wrote:

Dan Hurley wrote:

always paid off in full (using a cashback credit card) why they allowed that is beyond me? I don’t believe I broke the spirit of any rules let alone the letter of them.

You don’t think paying a credit card with a credit card is breaking the “spirit of the rules”?

If it was a provider that doesn’t allow it and you did it via Curve then yes.

Creation chose to directly accept credit cards. If anybody had any issue with that it should have been the other credit card provider. If you don’t want people to pay by credit card then why accept them?

[Harrier25]

Just because their ‘not fit for purpose’ systems couldn’t differentiate between debit and credit card payments doesn’t make it in the spirit of the rules, and could be the reason why they decided to closed you down with the rest of us.

[Dan Hurley]

Absolute nonsense, when I paid with a credit card a warning came up that the other card provider may treat it as a cash advance and charge extra fees and higher interest rates. They made a decision as a business to accept credit card payments. Barclaycard would have been within their rights to treat these transactions as cash advances, they chose not to. I did nothing wrong.

[Harrier25]

They certainly wouldn’t have made a conscious business decision to accept credit card payments.

[stevenhp1987]

Harrier25 wrote:

They certainly wouldn’t have made a conscious business decision to accept credit card payments.

Creation’s payment screen specifically mentioned that they accepted both Debit and Credit cards so, yes, they made a conscious business decision to accept them.

[Lula]

If they didn’t make a conscious business decision then are you suggesting that consumers should compensate for their ineptitude by not making use of the system they enabled? Hardly seems reasonable for consumers to try and look after Creation’s interests, especially when Creation have shown themselves to have zero regard for their customers’interests.

[Dan Hurley]

Their systems could recognise a Creation credit card (you couldn’t pay one of their cards off with another) but couldn’t tell the difference between a debit and credit card.

Either a conscious decision to allow credit cards or monumental incompetence that other providers don’t show. Either way paying with a credit card is within their rules. The first time I paid using a CC I paid £10 to see of there was a cash advance fee. The second time I did it over the phone to them and asked if it was alright. No fee and no objections.

Trying to not give me the points I earned between notice of closure and my account closing, without telling me and after printing on my last statement continue using your card for the following benefits listing 1 point per £1 spent……

Not within the spirit of the rules or the letter of them.

[JDB]

Lula wrote:

If they didn’t make a conscious business decision then are you suggesting that consumers should compensate for their ineptitude by not making use of the system they enabled? Hardly seems reasonable for consumers to try and look after Creation’s interests, especially when Creation have shown themselves to have zero regard for their customers’interests.

Fortunately the vast majority of people in this country know right from wrong and naturally do the “right thing” and just because someone mistakenly leaves the front door open, it shouldn’t be seen as an invitation to abuse that error any more than stealing sweets from children. Nobody is asking a consumer to “look after Creation’s interests” but simply to treat other people and organisations with respect and integrity.

[Lula]

@JDB Please do explain how paying off a credit card with another credit card shows a lack of respect and integrity.

The argument about leaving the front door open is not really a useful parallel.

As others have pointed out, the system was set to allow this. Most consumers are guided by the banks they deal with and trust them to set the boundaries of what is and isn’t allowed. Hence so many scandals with banks exploiting that trust and in some of those cases facing the consequences later. So in a system where the bank allows it, it’s reasonable to assume that the consumer is able to do it.

[Dan Hurley]

They know it is possible to pay with a credit card.

It says on the payment page we advise against using a credit card as your provider may treat it as a cash advance and charge higher interest/fees.

If they don’t want people to do it then they should either block credit card transactions or if they don’t want to invest the time into doing that put on the payment page “If you pay using a credit card your account may be closed”

If that’s the reason they closed my account they were just wrong for allowing it in the first place. It was a fair assumption it was allowed.

[Froggee]

I mostly agree with @JDB but have to say he’s 100% wrong on this one. I never used the ability to pay off Creation with a credit card but when it was quite obviously allowed by Creation, why on earth would you criticise people for doing this? I didn’t do it because I considered it cash recycling which was a personal red line but I tip my hat to those that did it. I could understand the credit card firms who were used to pay off Creation being peeved but equally what are mcc codes for? This should have been blocked by responsible lenders.

It is, in my view, unacceptable for a regulated financial institution to have allowed this capability, particularly if as others say Creation blocked the capability to pay with another Creation credit card.

The message to me is that Creation, an unsecured lender, is happy for its customers to get into more debt as long as they service their obligations to Creation. This is the sort of attitude and behaviour I would expect of baseball bat yielding doorstep lenders.

This may well have encouraged some vulnerable customers to get even further into debt than they already were.

[JDB]

@Froggee it isn’t just about paying the Creation balance by credit card, which was explicitly allowed, but the whole lifecycle of dodgy transactions that were involved in this sorry saga. It’s quite clear per the terms of eg a Barclaycard or Virgin credit card that they shouldn’t be used to make financial/cash type/cash advance transactions (including paying off another card) and everyone knew that which is why there were ridiculous code names. It would appear also that a great many of the transactions involved in this debacle were circular ones which, again, people knew perfectly well were improper and you will have been alerted to the potential nature of these transactions during AML training. I recall you mentioning that you have a CFA and I don’t think many of the things people were doing would meet the new ethics module. MCC codes are not properly coded; even Chase can’t manage them properly on its cashback card. What makes me laugh is that people were happy to compromise themselves and ignore the spirit of the rules, pillage Creation for years but then insist on strict terms and make a huge fuss to get those last few points out of Creation and of course blame Creation for everything. I do also wonder how they teach their children good moral standards.

[Dan Hurley]

They deliberately chose to accept credit cards. If they can block Creation issued credit cards they can block all credit cards. They wanted customers to pay their bills and didn’t care how. If I’d opened an account with another provider that had the same facility (I’m told Vanquis do) and flipped a balance too and fro between the two fine that wouldn’t have been in the spirit of the rules. Paying a legitimately accumulated balance using another credit card was using Creation’s system the way they designed it not using a sneaky back door loophole.

[TGLoyalty]

They even had a warning on both the website and via phone that using a credit card to pay could be liable for fees via your card issuer.

It was allowed.

[Rui N.]

Don’t feed the troll.

[Froggee]

@JDB isn’t a troll – he just has a different interpretation of what is reasonable.

I am indeed a CFA charterholder (and a Chartered Accountant) and sat a few other exams allowing me to work in a highly regulated industry for >20 years where I was considered a moral compass. This might account for me choosing to draw a different line to others with my personal actions. But sure I put a few tens of thousands through Curve and Revolut for spending and saving I was doing anyway.

Given this, perhaps the fact that I’m saying well done to those who benefited to the max shows that it isn’t quite as black and white as @JDB feels it is.

I remember a very long time ago when I had a client who got absolutely rinsed by a retail investor. It was back in the days when fund management firms weren’t as on the ball around (forward) unit pricing. So literally every day the retail investor took a view of whether he wanted to switch in or out of their US fund vs cash fund at midday based upon what futures were saying. He phoned up like clockwork at 11:55 apparently and was on first name terms with the unit trust dealers. You can imagine the sort of advantage this gave him. Because settlement was T+5 back then and his typical holding period was two days their system couldn’t handle it. So they tracked his transactions in an excel spreadsheet with the gains/losses (almost always gains for him) being booked into a suspense account.

This happened until the suspense account became material which was seven figures and then it became clear that unit trust manager down, client up. The attitude of the client was “we were idiots” so they banned him from switching but didn’t banish him.

The irony was if they’d accounted for it properly then the funds would have taken the hit rather than the unit trust management company. So they were saved from having to go back through a few years of transactions to try and establish the cost to the funds and other clients. At no point did they throw the dummy from the pram and say not fair. They took it on the chin and improved their processes.

This is what the likes of HSBC (who I consider grown-ups albeit fuddy duddies) did with Revolut/Curve etc. The more rubbish the financial institution, the more they blamed their clients.

And a final word on my favourite HFP poster is that when HSBC erroneously coded their new rewards portal wrongly and granted him 40,000 bonus points he was delighted with what he suspected was an error. Correct me if I’m wrong @JDB but you didn’t phone up to protest and let them know you weren’t entitled to these points? Or maybe you did and that’s why we all got them unwound?!

I’m currently wracked with guilt at the >40,000 Avios family Froggee collectively but erroneously were recently awarded but I’m taking @JDB’s lead on this and saying nothing.

Smiley face.

Froggee

[Lula]

@Froggee Indeed so. In fact he claimed it was an unpublished offer. But was then very quiet when it in fact turned out to be an error.

Creation allowing payment by credit card was very much a published offer. Whether they retrospectively consider it to be a mistake is a matter for them.

[JDB]

@Froggee rest assured (and I thought I had mentioned it at the time) that I did check with HSBC who confirmed it was an additional loyalty bonus (ie not the second part of the initial SUB), the criteria for which the agent was unable to specify but related to covid renewals although fees for two years had also been refunded.

Despite another poster’s oblique aspersions, HSBC seem to run various promotions/offers including the regular bonus for transfers to BA without telling anyone in the same way as they don’t publish the rules about which transactions do/don’t qualify for points, something they also apply inconsistently. Before you ask, yes I did also ask Amex when I erroneously received 10k Avios twice in the spend £5k get 10k Avios promotion and I received advance permission to keep any erroneously awarded bonus MR from the anticipated flawed implementation of the October 12 2022 changes if my hunch proved correct, which it did. I also spoke to someone quite senior at Barclays recently about the unexpected 25k Avios ‘welcome bonus’ even though I hadn’t switched and the explanation chimed with some tangential comments of Rob’s from last year.

[Froggee]

Ouch! Okay – you win. I bet you never speed and always give way to pedestrians at junctions too.

Smiley face.

Now we know who tipped off HSBC though.

Sad face.

Joking aside, what would Jesus @JDB do about erroneously awarded tier points and Avios?

[Lady London]

Frogge: “The more rubbish the financial institution, the more they blamed their clients”

Sums it up in a nutshell really.

[JDB]

@Froggee well that’s an interesting dilemma re BA! I don’t know the answer but I do see probity in one’s financial dealings as being very important for lots of reasons and also see them as being on on a different level to airline loyalty plans. These erroneously awarded tier points/Avios usually arise from post disruption re-bookings into an eligible booking class, so BA creates the entitlement, it’s not a fat finger error like keying an incorrect account number. They cannot be unaware of the ramifications of re-booking Avios reservations into revenue fare classes so do they care? I did once have them clawed back – BA paid us 3 x €600 following a cancellation, plus £3k of expenses for two extra days in Buenos Aires without demur but when I also claimed downgrade compensation because I alone was downgraded from F to J, they kicked up a big stink saying it was voluntary and took away the Avios, but eventually coughed up the cash.

[John]

Well that’s the end of the IHG cards.

[Azza]

John wrote:

Well that’s the end of the IHG cards.

Yep just had the email come through.

From 28th June.

Creation are naff but it’s still disappointing.

[WillPS]

Azza wrote:

John wrote:

Well that’s the end of the IHG cards.

Yep just had the email come through.

From 28th June.

Creation are naff but it’s still disappointing.

Are they sacking you off completely or offering you some non-IHG product to move over to?