http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/article3288613.ece?CMP=EMCeb1

“Exorbitant” bank overdraft charges are so complex that even a postgraduate maths student could not work them out, a study has claimed.

Which? asked customers to work out the overdraft charges on a range of mock bank statements and found that not one respondent was able to calculate all the fees correctly, including a maths PhD student. The 12 respondents managed to get only seven of forty-eight calculations right between them.

The way in which unauthorised overdraft penalties are applied varies greatly between banks. Which? found the highest fees to be from First Direct and its parent HSBC, at £150 a month. This would apply to customers with the First Direct 1st Account and HSBC Bank Account who were overdrawn for 21 days in a row and made 12 payments while in the red. Barclays’ fee for a customer in the same situation is £66.

Nationwide Building Society’s FlexAccount had the highest charge for customers overdrawn for a short period, at £50. This would apply if a customer was overdrawn for two days and made one payment while overdrawn. The Halifax Reward Account would charge the same customer £10.

Which? also highlighted the impact of daily unauthorised overdraft charges, which are as much as £6 a day in the case of Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest. These equate to an annual interest rate of 2,190 per cent on a £100 overdraft.

Banks are required to publish examples of their charges in six common scenarios on their websites. But annual statements detailing all charges, text message alerts and buffer zones may not be introduced until March 2013.

Peter Vicary-Smith, the chief executive of Which?, said: “While the Government has announced reforms to tackle unfair overdraft charges, they simply don’t go far enough.

‘It’s extremely disappointing to find that bank charges are still too high, too complex and impossible to compare.”