Customer chaos follows RBS mortgage shake-up

NEWS Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has caused chaos for many of its online banking customers following the rebranding of its current account mortgage product. In July 2001 RBS paid about £100m to buy the venture from its founders, Richard Branson's Virgin group and Australian financial outfit AMP, and this weekend renamed it 'The One'. It was previously known as 'Virgin One'. However, the website - www.virginone.com - is still active, even though one carrying the new branding has been set-up. Many users access their account via the web and over the weekend the service's helpdesk recived complaints from customers that the www.oneaccount.com log-in procedure resulted in an 'Invalid details entered, please try again' error message. Agents said the fault would be repaired some time on Monday. A One account spokesman told silicon.com: "It is confusing but the oneaccount.com site is actually only for new customers. Existing customers shouldn't be going there [but should carry on using the old www.virginone.com log-in]." A letter addressed to all Virgin One account holders several weeks ago from Virgin One MD Jayne-Anne Gadhia said the company name would change rather than the account name, the spokesman added. RBS will spend £15m on an advertising campaign - featuring puppet characters from 1970s kids TV show Hector's House - to get across the new One account name. Since its launch five years ago the One account - which sees current account credits offset against mortgage debts and other moneys owed - has attracted 92,000 customers, and lent £5.1bn by June 2002. However, the field - once thin as borrowers favoured fixed repayment and endowment-based products - is getting more crowded, with around 20 companies, including Barclays with OpenPlan and HBOS with IF, breathing down the early leader's neck. In today's FT, One account MD Gadhia said that as the offerings become more of a commodity, providers will have to differentiate on customer service.