Unsecured variable rate personal loans

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..from the beginning of July 2009, it’s no longer available to new applicants.

The current economic climate means that securing credit is becoming increasingly difficult for many people. At RaboDirect we want to be able to meet customers expectations in terms of the products we offer and unfortunately at the moment, this isn’t the case as far as the Credit Account is concerned. And so, to be fair to our potential Credit Account customers, we’d like to take some time to see if we can address this rather than continue to take people through an application process that doesn’t meet with the expectations we’ve set. Also, the Payment Protection product we were offering was withdrawn from the market on the 30th of June 2009 by our third party provider. And so we feel it’s best all round if we close applications to new customers while we work these things through. We hope this doesn’t put you out too much and hopefully we’ll be able to help you again at some point in the future.

No wonder it's becoming more difficult to get credit, when you go and close it down!

Easy to lend when things were good, eh? But not prepared to give your customers a service when things are not so good!

I have fished around in the past couple of weeks and found that it now seems to be impossible to get an unsecured personal loan in the "car" range (10k to 30k) except if you have an existing relationship with a bank. I got offered 9.19% variable apr by AIB but only after fighting my way through call centre hire purchase waffle to someone actually in my branch with access to my account details. It still appears that the decisions are being made by computers not humans these days though... no-one actually asked me about my current employment status! (which is fine so far, thanks for asking).