A PBA (Packaged Bank Account) is a personal current account which has a range of services and insurance policies bundled up together. In return for these additional services, the customer pays a monthly fee, which is usually around £10 - £25 per month.
Customers can be pushed into taking a packaged bank account by sales people, with little or no explanation of the terms, and with the focus being on the underlying bank account rather than the add on (or packaged) insurance policies. Lenders have failed to check whether customers are eligible to be covered by the packaged services and as a result, millions of customers could have been paying for cover under a packaged bank account which is not necessary and, at worst, absolutely worthless.
Cover usually includes breakdown cover and travel and mobile phone insurance and complaints often include people who subsequently found out that they couldn’t use the benefits - because of age limits on travel insurance or not owning a car for example. Other complaints come from people who never wanted the accounts but found they’d been signed up without permission and customers who had agreed to the accounts but told the bank to cancel them, only to find out it hadn’t.
*FSA Consultation paper CP12-17
The typical services or insurance that are usually provided within a packaged bank account include:
All figures above show amount calculated after deduction of taxes and fees