Do you think customer loyalty has anything to do with the rate that the bank will offer you?

If you answered yes to this question then you will enjoy this next story.

A longtime friend of mine contacted me recently stating he was being ripped off from the Commonwealth bank of Australia.

Now for privacy reasons, I can’t use his real name but for this post let’s call him Adam Smith.

So Adam advised that his home loan interest rate had risen in the last couple of months to 4.95%.

Adam said to me “mate, I have everything with the CBA and I don’t want to change banks” to which I replied “100% understand, there is a small trick that we can do in this scenario called the pretend discharge where we fill in a discharge form and pretend to leave. This triggers the retention team to give you a call and they offer the best deal.”

Due to our friendship, I did this all for free and filled out the form for him with the only intention to help a mate get a better rate.

I have spoken about this before in my previous posts. This is without a doubt one of the best ways to get yourself a good deal without having to refinance away from your current bank.

So then this happened…

Anyway, to my surprise, I received an email from the CBA (as we put our details in the broker section) to advise that the discharge had been approved. It appeared that customer loyalty failed him.

I contacted Adam and asked him if he had been called and what offer he received. Adam said, “mate, they didn’t even call me!”

Adam is so upset with the CBA and your know what, I can’t blame him. As mortgage brokers, we see this daily, however, Adam was still under the belief that because he had been with the bank his whole life, they would look after him. He was under the impression that the bank cared about things like this and that they would want to do anything they could to keep him.

The unfortunate truth here is that big banks like CBA, actually don’t give a s*** about you.

They have so many new clients coming in that losing a few on the way out doesn’t bother them at all.

The saddest thing here is that they just lost this client for life.

“you would think they would care considering how long I have been with them, oh well, **** them, let’s move asap”

I offered Adam a professional package (so a loan with an offset which Adam didn’t even have with CBA) for a rate of 3.29% and applied on Monday, unconditional by Wednesday, docs on Thursday, and settled on Friday.

Adam  happy to leave the Commonwealth bank and he is now saving an extra $458 a month on interest monthly. That’s a saving of $5496 just in the first year alone.

Not only that, but Adam received a cashback from the new lender which covered the cost to refinance.

They don’t care, but we do

The big players may not care about customer loyalty, but the team at Loan Location does. We make sure we check in with our clients and adjust their rates if we can. If we can’t, then we refinance.

So if you are getting ripped off by your bank. Well, you most likely are.