How I got my bank to straighten up

The story starts in 2004 when I took a 5 year loan against commercial property from KM Bank at 11.25% Rate of Interest (ROI). A year later when I topped up this loan, the first loan had risen to an ROI of 11.75% and the additional amount was given at 12%. I didn't understand how the same bank could give two loans to the same person against the same collateral at 2 different rates of interest?

The rate steadily kept on increasing, till it got to an usurious 15.25% a couple of months ago! When I got the letter from my customer-unfriendly bank, I naturally went into a bit of a depression. Imagine my anger, when a customer service representative called me to ask if I would like to top up the loan again, since the outstanding principal had reduced to a 3rd of the original amount and the property value had gone up!? I shot her an angry email response telling her to basically get lost! Then later, a senior rep came to me and told me to write to UK (the CMD of the Bank for chrisssakes!) and ask for the ROI to be re-negotiated if I agreed to top-up the loan.

None of this obviously worked, until I hired a loan agent to talk to other banks. Within 10 days I got 3 offers, the lowest of which was 11.0% from Barclays! When I informed KM Bank about this, I got an SOS call back from them with a confirmed offer letter reducing my ROI from 15.25% to 11.25% with immediate effect! Since the pre-payment penalty was another 2%, I told the other bank that I would stick with KM. They then re-negotiated down to 10%! I immediately triggered the request for balance transfer from KM to the Barclays and happily paid the 2% pre-payment penalty.

End result: ROI reduced from 15.25% down to 10% in 2 weeks of effort.

Moral of the story: if your bank is sucking your hard-earned money, show them it is a competitive market and you can go to the bank down the street and get a much better deal!