A recent report has shown that many credit card companies have hiked up a variety of different rates and fees in order to try and make more money from consumers. Over the past month credit card companies have introduced over thirty different fee and rate hikes, which could end up costing consumers millions of pounds extra. The main rises have been on cash withdrawal fees and cash interest rates, according to reports. The report also indicated that a number of building societies had increased foreign usage commission and balance transfer fees.

One credit card customer commented on the different rate hikes, stating that these rises had made her nervous about using her credit cards at all. She said: “I have a number of different cards from a variety of providers. After hearing about all of these different rate and fee rises I feel frightened to use any of them for fear of the charges that I will have to pay. It’s got to the point where I am thinking of taking out a loan to pay off all of my credit cards and then getting rid of them altogether.”

Many experts state that one of the reasons for these different rate and fee hikes is so that credit card companies can find different ways to recoup financial losses stemming from the ceiling limit that regulators placed on fines imposed by credit card companies last year. Some credit cards had been charging close to £40 per fee, but this was capped at a maximum of £12 per fee last year.

The largest hike was imposed by the Alliance and Leicester according to reports, where the cash fee was raised from 2.25% to 3%. Rises of 0.5% were imposed by a number of other card providers, including the AA, Bank of Scotland, Halifax, Intelligent Finance, Nationwide, Smile and Yorkshire Building Society.