As part of carrying out your instructions to us, we may need to hold your money in our client account. In holding client money, we have an obligation to pay interest on that money at a fair and reasonable rate and are required to put in place an interest policy.
This policy sets out the guidelines for when interest will be paid and is summarised below.
We aim to account to you for interest at a reasonable rate of interest, but as the holding of
your funds is incidental to the carrying out of your legal instructions, the rate is unlikely to be as high as the rate you may be able to obtain when depositing the money we hold on your behalf yourself.
We must ensure that money held on client account is immediately available and therefore require an instant access account that allows us to make an immediate withdrawal. All of this is taken into consideration when we set our interest rate. Unless you are informed otherwise, your money will be held in our general client account. If your monies are held outside of this account, the interest rate applied will fall out of the scope of this policy.
The interest rate which we pay on monies held on general client account is the interest rate which the Royal Bank of Scotland (being the bank with whom we hold our client account) offers on balances under £999,999.00 on its instant access business savings account.
We review this rate on a monthly basis and will update the rate within five working days if the rate has changed. The relevant interest rate can be obtained at your request.
Interest will be calculated from the time the funds become cleared for interest purposes:
- For cheques or banker’s drafts, this will be 7 working days after the cheque or draft has been deposited with our bank.
- For amounts received by debit or credit card, interest will start to accrue from the date of the actual receipt. This is usually 3 days after the transaction has been authorised.
- For direct transfers or same day payments the funds become cleared on the day after receipt.
Interest will be calculated on a daily basis and calculated on amounts held overnight from the day the funds become cleared for interest purposes.
Interest will not be paid if the total amount of interest calculated for the period that cleared funds are held is less than £50.
We reserve the right to charge negative interest if the Bank of England base rate were to fall below 0.01%. We would absorb any cost less than £50 however any charge above this would be re-charged onto you.
Interest will be calculated either quarterly, or at the conclusion of the legal transaction and we will be credited to the client ledger.
Any interest paid to you is paid without any deduction for income tax. As such it is your responsibility to inform HM Revenue & Customs of amounts of interest received from us, and the implications of this will depend upon your own financial circumstances.
Last reviewed – 26 April 2023