Nationwide fails to provide Northern Ireland customers with Switching Leaflet

The Competition and Markets Authority has accused Nationwide Building Society of breaching the Northern Ireland Personal Current Account Banking Market Investigation Order of 2008, stating that the mortgage lender had failed to supply some of its customers with information on switching accounts.

Nationwide was said to have committed breaches of Article 7(2) of the order over a twelve-month period - namely by failing to provide a copy of a Switching Leaflet to around 120,000 customers, as required by the Article.

The bank claimed that the cause of the breach was that the Northern Ireland area code used for mailing to customers was incorporated into one larger regional code, resulting in the previous area code being removed.

According to Nationwide, its team undertaking the activity was unaware that the area code acted as a trigger for the inclusion of the Switching Leaflet and that by changing the area code, they would leave customers' who opened accounts in its Northern Ireland branches without the leaflet.

"The CMA is very concerned about this breach as it follows a similar breach of the Order by Nationwide in 2017," said the watchdog in a letter to Nationwide on Thursday.

In the 2017 breach, Nationwide informed the CMA that from January 2017 to May 2017 it had failed to supply 79,396 customers with wording reminding them that they could close the PCA and seek to obtain PCA services from a different bank and a copy of the Switching Leaflet.

As pf 1500 BST, Nationwide shares were down 5.18% to 155.50p.