Nationwide voted most responsible credit card provider

Nationwide Building Society has received an award for "Most Responsible Credit Card Lending Practices" at this year's prestigious Card Awards, held at the Grosvenor House Hotel, London in January.

The Society was recognised for its transparency and clarity of credit card information, for its positive order of payments and for providing fee-free card use abroad.

As a responsible lender, Nationwide always tries to ensure all credit card applicants are able to meet their monthly repayments; the Society always uses external credit reference agency information to help make that assessment.

Nationwide has been campaigning for greater clarity in the credit card market since 1999 when it became the first financial services provider to produce a Summary Box in its marketing literature. The industry has since adopted this comparison tool and now all providers are required by APACS to include a Summary Box in their marketing material.

Almost all UK card providers choose to allocate payments first to balances at the lowest rate of interest (for example, 0% balance transfers), leaving balances outstanding on the higher interest rates, such as purchases and cash advances. Nationwide is the only major credit card provider that applies payments to the most expensive debt first across all its credit cards, saving customers £2.1 million in extra interest and helping them to reduce their debt faster.

Nationwide also offers its customers fee-free card use abroad whereas most other providers charge their customers a 2.75% currency loading fee.

Jeremy Wood, Nationwide's director of consumer finance said: "We understand how difficult it can be for consumers to make the right card choice. This is why it is important that the information is presented to customers clearly to help them choose the card that best suits them.

"We have long since championed responsible lending across all of our products and we are especially proud to have been recognised for our efforts in the credit card market. This, we believe, is another example of Nationwide's policies towards fairness and clarity bringing benefit to our customers."