Layout of the Terms and Conditions booklets for the three companies:
Do they have a distinctive way of writing the name of the company?
Purpose of the documents:
Terms and conditions (whether of sale or of service) are important because they create certainty between the parties. They detail the responsibilities of both you and your customer. Your terms and conditions will have to comply with existing legislation including the Sale of Goods Act 1979 (as amended); the Consumer Credit Act 1974, if appropriate, (as amended) and any legislation relating to restrictive trade practices.
It is also vital to ensure your terms and conditions actually apply to the contract. This is a common mistake, which is frequently made by those who don’t fully understand the principle of the contract.
To ensure that your Terms & Conditions apply, they have to be agreed at the time the contract is made. This means that along with an account opening application it will be prudent to send your terms and conditions to the customer, have them signed and returned to you. This will ensure in any subsequent contract your terms and conditions will apply. Simply making reference to terms and conditions at the reverse of an invoice on delivery of the goods when this has not been previously agreed will mean your terms and condition will not apply.
What should Terms and Conditions contain?
There is no universal rule although as a matter of practice your terms and conditions will contain certain clauses. It is common for them to address some of the following issues.
- When payment should be made
- Interest due on outstanding accounts
- Who owns the goods prior to payment
- Responsibility for the goods
Other similarities:
- All three companies made use of bullet points to subdivide their terms and conditions
- None of them used tables or diagrams to present their information.
- Each of them used black or blue font and one of them, the Woolwich bank made use of both colour.
- All of them have their addresses, telephone numbers e-mail or fax so that the customers can contact then if they want.
- Woolwich, Barclays and Natwest used really small fonts for their information.
The differences are that, Natwest is the only company who has a logo. Barclays used background colour inside the booklet to make it more effective. Woolwich used a table to present information, which makes it easier to understand.
The other documents, which I am going to compare, are: The Current Charges – Charges and Rate of interest booklets. The Prime Rate is the interest rate charged by banks to their most creditworthy customers (usually the most prominent and stable business customers). The rate is almost always the same amongst major banks. Adjustments to the prime rate are made by banks at the same time; although, the prime rate does not adjust on any regular basis.
Bank charges are the payment debited or deducted from your bank account to pay for the services your bank provides.
What services do banks normally charge for?
- Charging policies vary from bank to bank
- In general banks charge:
- Interest at an agreed rate for loans and overdrafts
- Fees for transactions that pass through your account, e.g. payments into and from your account, stopping cheques, returning cheques as unpaid due to insufficient funds, issuing bankers' drafts
- Fees for arranging and managing loans and overdrafts
- Charges are usually deducted monthly or quarterly .
The layout of the documents:
Other similarities:
- All three documents present the interest information using tables.
- They all have subtitles to present their information, which makes it easier to read and understand.
The differences are that Barclays used borders and shading as a device to improve the layout of the brochure. Natwest and Woolwich made use of tables but they altered the border by making them not appear in the booklets.
Presenting the information:
The companies used high Standard English to write the information. This is because the targeted audience are people of a higher age group, and the fact that they are dealing with thousands of people; they have to make sure that the information presented is formal. This is the reason to why they used a Standard writing style. The drawback to this is that the language used can be to a quite advanced level for certain people. Therefore, some people may not fully understand what the booklet is all about.
