Virgin Money bank switching offer: 10% interest

This is the first deal from the bank in 19 months

While most bank switching offers provide cash, Virgin Money usually takes a different approach. Since launching in late 2019, the offers have included free wine, charity donations, Virgin Experience vouchers, cashback and Virgin Red points.

This one takes yet another approach, a massive interest rate on savings that could be worth £110. Here’s what you need to know.

*Update 22/5/24: from 1 August 2024 the underlying rate will drop from 2% to 1%, plus the £35 via Snoop has been paused. Both have been reflected in the article below*

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What you’ll get for switching

The switch offer from 1 May until 31 May 2024 offers the following:

• 10% gross / 10.47% AER interest on balances of up to £1,000 for 12 months

This is on top of an ongoing rate of 1% gross / 1.01% AER on the same amount of cash with two of the accounts (M Plus and Club M), which means it’s effectively a combined 11% return.

However if you have the full £1,000 saved the interest paid won’t compound at this rate, so you’re actually looking at 11% gross and a total interest of £110.

Other ongoing extras provided with the Virgin Money M current accounts include:

• Access to a 5.05% paying one year fixed ISA
• Fee free spending abroad

How to qualify for the offer

To qualify for the Virgin Money switching incentive you need to :

• Not have an existing Virgin Money M, M Plus or Club M account or closed one since 30 April 2024
• Live in the UK
• Be aged 16 or above (18 to open online)

This means if you’ve previously had a switching deal from Virgin Money but have since closed your account you’ll be able to take advantage of this one too.

You can only get the offer once, so you won’t be able to double up with a joint account, though there’s nothing stopping you both opening up individual accounts

How to get the offer

By 31 May 2024 you need to open one of the following accounts:

• Virgin Money M
• Virgin Money M Plus
• Virgin Money Club M

Then by 26 June 2024 you need to:

• Complete a full switch from a different bank using the Current Account Switch Service
• Transfer two direct debits (here are some quick and easy ones if you’re short)

I’ve written more about how to switch bank accounts here.

How to earn the 10% bonus interest

This bonus rate of interest will apply from 1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025, so there’s at least one month if not two where you’ll only be earning the underlying 1%.

That means it’s better to keep your cash in a better paying account until then, and only move your money on 1 July.

Bear in mind that if you have the full £1,000 saved, you won’t be earning the same rate on the interest once it’s paid, so you’ll want to move that money to a different account each month to get the best return.

Just a note, if you’re offered the M current account you won’t get the 1% rate as well, just the 10% bonus.

When you get the money

Both the 1% interest and the bonus 10% interest will be paid on the last working day of each month into your current account.

You’ll need to keep your current account open in order to get the interest.

How to get an extra £35 on top

Switch offer summary

How it compares to other switching incentives

Offering interest is different from the switching incentives we see from other banks. Most banks go with hard cash, usually between £150 and £200. You can see the latest ones here,

Should you switch to Virgin Money?

Which Virgin current account should you choose?

There are three accounts you can go for here. The M is only for those who can’t get the other two (it’s a ‘basic’ account), while the Club M has travel insurance added for a monthly £12.50 fee.

Though the Club M is worth a look if you want the included insurance policies (it’s one of the cheapest packaged accounts out there), most people will be best off going for the M Plus.

When it launched, the M Plus account was one of the highest paying places to put your savings, but in the last few years it’s been blown out of the water by alternatives. You do however get access to the top paying 1 year fixed ISA, and a decent enough easy access ISA.

Though you can use it free free overseas, it’s not the best option for holiday spending. And the cashback offers are fine but not a reason to get the account. The app is fine, though again not one of my top picks. So overall I personally wouldn’t make it my main current account. Here’s my full review.

What customers think

Over at our sister site Smart Money People, customers leaving reviews rate Virgin Money’s M Plus account as a 4 out of 5. You can read the reviews or leave your own here.

Previous offers

• 20,000 Virgin Red points (13 April to 17 August 2022)
• 5% interest on savings
• Virgin Experience voucher
• 12 bottles of Virgin wine

Virgin tends to change switching offers three or four times a year. A regular offer was free wine, so I’m including this for reference in case it comes back.

Free wine

The first offer which gave 15 bottles of wine worth £180 ended on the 14th February 2021 and was replaced with fewer bottles but an additional £50 charity donation. The section has been updated to reflect the latter offer, which ended in June 2021.

Virgin Money claims the 12 free bottles are worth £150. That’s an average of £12.50 per bottle. You have a choice of a red and white selection, or if you don’t drink or a non-alcoholic bundle on 15 bottles worth £75.

Here’s what you’ll get with the red and white selection:

• Silenus Limited Release Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon – Red – x1
• Les Arbousiers Reserve Sauvignon Blanc – White – x1
• Bendico Terre Siciliane Vermentino – White – x1
• Finca Manzanos Selection de la Familia Rioja Blanco – White – x2
• El Nubarron Cabernet – Red – x2
• Depasso Nero d’Avola Leggermente Appassito – Red – x1
• Finca Manzanos Selection de la Familia Rioja – Red – x1
• Torre Aguila Gran Reserva – Red – x1
• Brio Pinot Grigio – White – x2

The non-alcoholic option of 15 bottles is valued at £75.

I’ve had a look for the wines elsewhere for comparison, but they are only on the Virgin Wine website. So it’s hard to say if their selling price is a fair price. But you can compare them to other mixed cases they do sell.

The total value of this selection is closer to £140 when based on the single bottle price sold by Virgin Wines. But if you buy other mixed cases from Virgin Wine you’d get a discount of between 6% and 21%.

Though this bundle is exclusive to switchers, let’s assume you’d get 13% off if it was sold to other customers. Then it’d be around £120. So not as much as stated, but that’s still a decent “freebie”.

But of course, if you were buying 12 bottles of wine yourself, would you usually get them from Virgin? Possibly not.

You could easily get 12 decent bottles of wine from the supermarket or somewhere like Majestic at £9 each, totalling £108. And if you timed it for when these wines were on offer (let’s assume an average of 25%), you’d pay closer to £81 in total, or £6.75 a bottle.

So personally I’d value the free wine at around the £80 mark. Though it’s some £60 less than the promised value, it’s still comparable with the cash bonuses offered by other banks.

Virgin Red Points

One offer was 20,000 Virgin Red points. There’s a long list of things you can swap your points for on the Virgin Red site. Here are a few examples:

• Virgin Wine
• Virgin Experiences
• Virgin Atlantic
• EMI records
• Virgin Voyages
• Greggs
• Vue
• AO Arena concerts
• Charity donations
• London Theatre Direct

This is certainly the most flexible Virgin Money switching offer so far. If you want wine, you can get wine. If you don’t, you can pick from a number of different things. And if you collect Virgin points to go towards flights, then this is a hefty boost.

But what’s the actual value of the points? This gives a rough guide to the value of the points based on the cost of buying some of the options elsewhere:

Product	Points needed	Cost elsewhere	Value of 100 points	Value of 20,000 points
12 bottles of Virgin Wine	16,000	Around £110	67p	£137.50
Greggs sausage roll	200	£1	50p	£100
Vinyl album	4,000	£25	63p	£125
Mustang driving via Virgin Experience	6,000	£39	65p	£130
Money off Virgin Atlantic flights	3,000	£16.50	55p	£110

If we use the examples above of ways to redeem your points, we can assume you’ll get between £100 and £140 of goods for your 20,000 points.

However, the question is – would you pay that much for them? The wine, for example, might be worth £110 according to Virgin, but you could easily buy a dozen bottles of equivalent wine at the supermarket when on offer for less than £80.

Likewise you might find other items such as an album or experience for less elsewhere, or use voucher codes to bring prices down.

Plus, there’s very little that comes in at 20,000 points so you might have to mix and match different options. That could mean you buy things you don’t really want or need with leftover points, or perhaps not be able to use them all.

So I think you should be more conservative in the value of the points at closer to £100. Still decent, but beatable elsewhere.