'Service, not rates, made switching easy'

After eight years of repaying her mortgage to Bank of Ireland, Mary Clarke decided enough was enough.

"We were looking at remortgaging mostly because we wanted to take out a bigger loan to do some home improvement, so we shopped around for rates. But it was the service that attracted us to EBS."

Clarke, who lives in Lucan, found that the two lenders couldn't have been more different in their approach to customer service.

"I was a very loyal customer to Bank of Ireland. I had my life assurance, my home insurance, my mortgage and my Visa with them, but there was just a total lack of customer service. There was no follow-up on anything, they would just give you the information pack. EBS would call and ask us if we got the information pack and whether we had any queries," she says. "When you're faced with a mortgage and you're fed up with forms and you're working and running around after children, customer service is important. The EBS adviser gave us her mobile number so we could contact her on the weekend. When they sent us the forms, there were tabs showing us where we needed to sign," Clarke adds.

"I just felt like it was an easy process." It was also a cheap one. In her initial conversation with the EBS sales adviser, she discovered that the lender was offering a new package to switchers where they would pay their legal fees, which typically cost €999 or more.

Clarke and her husband have increased their total combined borrowings of €89,000 to €175,000 in order to built an extension to their house and construction work has just begun.

EBS's standard variable rate of 3.25 per cent, while not the cheapest mortgage rate in the market, is lower than Bank of Ireland's standard variable rate of 3.6 per cent.

Despite the doubling of the loan size, the monthly repayments have not increased too drastically, she says, although this is partly because they have extended the term of their mortgage from 25 years at Bank of Ireland to 30 years at EBS.

After a one-year low-start option expires, the couple's monthly repayments will be €760.