AIB offers €3.3m in goodwill payments to ex-Ulster Bank customers for ‘teething issues’

AIB is writing to almost 33,000 former Ulster Bank tracker mortgage borrowers who transferred to it almost a year ago, offering each of them a token €100 goodwill payment as it apologised for “teething problems” that affected some of its new customers.

“AIB is making a payment of €100 to former Ulster Bank tracker mortgage customers as a gesture of goodwill, to acknowledge any instances during their transfer where the customers’ experience fell short of our standards,” a spokesman said, confirming the payments.

“This is in addition to ensuring that no customer is out of pocket as a result of any error on our part. We look forward to continuing to support these customers in the years ahead.”

The total cost of the goodwill payments comes to €3.3 million.

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AIB took over about €4 billion of tracker home loans – across 33,000 accounts – from Ulster Bank last July, representing 80 per cent of the mortgages it had agreed to buy from the UK-owned lender as it retreats from the Irish market. The remaining €1 billion of loans are due to move in the second half of this year.

The bank was forced to apologise on two occasions last August for issues encountered by some customers in the immediate aftermath of the migration.

AIB initially apologised to a group of tracker mortgage customers who had been notified by letter of a sharper-than-expected increase in their monthly repayments from October due to an apparent previous error. The bank said that letter had been wrong and those larger repayment increases would not take place.

Weeks later, it had to say sorry to about 40 customers after their direct debits were cancelled following the movement of mortgages from Ulster Bank.

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Tracker mortgage holders enjoyed the lowest rates in the Irish market for more than a decade before the European Central Bank (ECB) started to hike rates almost two years ago. The ECB’s key lending rate – against which tracker loans are priced – stood at zero between March 2016 and July 2022. They increased to a peak of 4.5 per cent last September, but were reduced by a quarter of a percentage point last week.