HFC Bank

HFC Bank is a subsidiary of Household International Inc. and was established over 20 years ago. In 1998, the bank merged with Beneficial Bank into a new bank. Five years later, Household International Inc. and HFC Bank PLC moved to the HSBC Group. Now, HFC Bank Ltd. offers financial services and products through retailers amongst which are B&Q, Dixons, PC World, and Currys. The main operations centre of HFC is in Birmingham.

HFC provides retail loans, card products, insurance for business companies in the electrical, furniture and construction areas to over three million customers. The loans vary from home equity through home purchase, refinance to debt consolidation.
From the HFC credit card products, the most popular is the Platinum Master Card. It is offered in two modifications: the Hilton HHonors Platinum MasterCard (15.9 % APR, intro period: 6 months) and the RSPCA Platinum MasterCard (16.9 % APR, intro period: 9 months). Customers can apply for credit cards online, but they must prove their eligibility by a good-to-excellent credit report. The bank offers no annual maintenance fees and flexible credit limits. It provides additional services such as online account management, bill payment, and bill transfers available for 24 hours.

The newest product of HFC Bank, launched in July, is HFC Transflow. The latter targets facilitation of campus life for students (payments of university’s fees can be made online). The special thing about this kind of loan is that students are not obliged to have a banking account in order to use the online services.

The HFC business approach is deemed to be customers-friendly. They don’t bury their clients with figures. Instead, the bank offers numerous calculators and the expert assistance of its personnel. You can compute your mortgage payments or debt consolidation and compare refinancing opportunities and loans. Clients could ask for help while defining the amounts they can borrow: e.g. is it better for them to rent, what is the value of their savings, etc. Also if they experience unexpected changes as loss of employment or medical problems, their loan conditions could be renegotiated.

In addition, HFC has built its partner program, powered by the Commission Junction and running one of the most successful partner-marketing networks on the Internet. So, the bank could be considered as “partner-friendly” as well.



Copyright © 2012 UKBanks.org. All rights reserved.