Is Egg trying to stop me closing my account?

Q I closed my Egg credit card account, leaving a balance of £20.93. Egg agreed to transfer this sum to my bank account, which it did. I then found a negative balance of 16p on my credit card statement.

Nobody has given me a straight answer for why this happened and Egg refuses to close my account until I pay the16p. If I send a cheque Egg may charge £2, leaving me £2 overdrawn. The other alternative is to reopen a direct debit which costs me even more time and hassle.

It's clearly a ploy to force customers to keep accounts open, and I'm being fobbed off every time I call, all for 16p. What should I do?

SS

A According to Egg, this £2 charge is standard and is intended to discourage customers from making cheque payments because Egg is an online bank and makes its savings from the lower overheads associated with not processing paper payments. The bank also says it will waive the charge in your case. When I contacted Egg, this is what it had to say:

"The 16p was a legitimate interest cost charged to SS's account, not a miscalculation. It relates to the interest costs on balances held on the Egg card before the customer transferred them elsewhere. Clearly if customers have debt revolving on a credit card and choose to balance transfer it to another card, it is legitimate to charge interest on those balances up to the point in the monthly cycle at which they were transferred.

"Even though interest is calculated daily it is not practical to charge it to an account daily, therefore it is added at the following statement date. This explains why the 16p was added after SS cleared the balance. Normally this would not be a problem, but SS had prematurely cancelled the direct debit mandate, leaving a cheque as the other option of payment.

"In terms of Egg's policy, we expect all customers to repay all balances and interest costs before they choose to cancel or stop using their card. However where customers have a very small outstanding balance and have cancelled their direct debit mandates we will review it on a case-by-case basis and may agree to write it off. This is what we chose to do for SS."