The mailbag of Personal Finance has been overloaded for the past two weeks with letters from readers complaining about bank margins.
In one of the worst examples, a service organisation recently received a letter from its bank manager offering it, to quote directly from the letter from Standard Bank, an unsolicited overdraft of R11 100 at the "Prevailing Interest Rate (per annum) of 29 percent".
The organisation currently has R200 000 invested with Standard Bank on a 32-day notice deposit earning 14,25 percent. The organisation also has a R25 000 credit balance on its normal operations account.
The letter from the reader concluded: "For the record, my organisation will certainly not respond to Standard's largess at anything above 20 percent."