"If you put in £1000 per month you get £5 a month from them – £60 a year. So i went and opened 3 accounts with them…. £180 a year for doing nothing… You don't need to put a lump sum of £1000 in at one go, for example you can put £100 in 10 times etc. Once it's done you can take the money back out of the account it only needs to be in for 30 seconds"
You can even do it by standing order
I think TJ's right, though, unsecured short-term lending is going to get expensive- RBOS have a similiar change in the pipes, and they're also cracking down on credit card signups. This particular thing is HBOS's response to the charges court case- I was briefly involved in the project and it's basically designed to be cost-neutral, the income from the overdrafts is expected to be roughly the same as the loss of income from charges. Except now instead of it only being people delinquent on their debts who pay, it's everyone. Hooray.
The real fun's still to come, with RBOS getting out of the open credit card business, and so many other credit cards being MBNA rebrands, and general creditworthiness requirements increasing, a lot of people who've been doing the balance transfer shuffle for the last decade are just about to run into problems.