Sam and Priya’s house deposit: joint accounts and shared banking groups

Disclaimer: This story is fictional and created for illustrative purposes only. It does not describe real people or events.

We thought we were spreading our money around. 

My partner Priya and I had been saving for a few years for our first house. Every month, we paid most of our savings into a joint bank account, but we also kept money in our separate current accounts for day-to-day spending. 

Since our current accounts were both with a different bank to our joint account, we had always assumed each account was FSCS protected up to £120,000 per person. 

But when we checked, we were surprised to discover that our two current accounts and our joint account were actually part of the same banking group and therefore shared a banking licence. 

This meant that, instead of each account having its own £120,000 protection limit per person, FSCS would add together the money in my current account and my share of our joint account and do the same for Priya.  

In other words, each of us was protected up to £120,000 across all of our eligible deposits held under the same banking license. 

To make sure our savings benefitted from the maximum FSCS protection, we decide to open a new savings account with a bank in a different banking group that had its own banking license.  

It was a useful reminder that when it comes to deposit protection, it's not just the brand name that matters – it's the banking licence behind it.