Read your Lloyds flyer if you care about paperless billing

Submitted by: The Two Sides Team February 12, 2014

Lloyds plans to end monthly paper bank statements unless you call to reinstate them.

Patrick Collinson's article in The Guardian's Money Blog gives food for thought and highlights the good work being done by the Keep Me Posted campaign.

An innocuous flyer is falling out of the monthly bank statements going to millions of current account holders at Lloyds. Read it. It tells you that statements will no longer be posted out monthly, instead, it will be every three months, unless you call a number to reinstate them.

One of the more bizarre stories we ran last year was of a woman who didn't realise, for two years, that her pay cheques were being wrongly credited to another person's account. One reason, she said, was that she had opted for paperless statements, she didn't check online, and did not know the money was going awry. Yes, she was castigated by the online community, but many people, myself included, aren't devoted to checking smartphones all the time, and prefer to scrutinise a monthly statement on paper.

I must, though, accept I'm in a minority, NatWest tells me only 15% of its customers elected to carry on receiving monthly statements when it carried out a similar exercise to Lloyds' in 2012.

The paperless revolution is happening across every consumer service. You can fight back with the "Keep Me Posted" campaign, although it's an irony that the campaign is largely online.

Good Housekeeping held a similar view.

Your bill, your way!

While the rise of online bills and internet banking is convenient for tech-happy consumers, it has unfairly disadvantaged those who don't always use the internet. Customers who still want to receive paper correspondence often have to pay for the privilege, or are ineligible for the best rates and offers, which are exclusive to online-only customers. So we wholeheartedly support the Keep Me Posted Campaign. It wants organisations to give consumers the right to choose how they receive their bills and statements, and not be penalised for preferring paper. The campaign is also asking providers to make it easy for consumers to opt back in to paper correspondence without penalty.

Keep Me Posted is a partnership of representatives from charities, interest groups and business. We've come together as we believe that we have a responsibility to fight for the consumer's right to choose. – See more at: http://www.keepmeposteduk.com/campaign#sthash.E4ABxMVm.dpuf

Keep Me Posted is a partnership of representatives from charities, interest groups and business. The partnership has come together as they believe that they have a responsibility to fight for the consumer's right to choose.

Keep Me Posted is a partnership of representatives from charities, interest groups and business. We've come together as we believe that we have a responsibility to fight for the consumer's right to choose. – See more at: http://www.keepmeposteduk.com/campaign#sthash.E4ABxMVm.dpuf

http://www.keepmeposteduk.com

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