You’re there with your degree in your hand, your whole career ahead of you, and a £2000 overdraft in your bank account… But it doesn’t matter because the bank has given you 18 months to pay it off before thay start hitting you with 10% apr.
Well, HSBC finally got fed up of giving graduates free credit this year and scrapped their interest free overdrafts. Not a good move. For a bank that has recently posted £11.5bn profits you’d think they had more sense. The whole idea of offering these free overdrafts is to secure a customer for life. A customer who is statistically more likely to earn you a nice lifetime revenue from charges, interest and possibly a business account too.

As soon as the changes were made, grads got together using social networking site Facebook to organise a mass boycott of HSBC which provided more bad press than Prince Phillip on an international visit. The NUS supported the move and as a result HSBC have now reversed the decision.

Let this be a lesson to greedy banks. You may be having increasing bad debt trouble, but remember you also make billions of pounds profit every year.