Two tottering financial angels finally fell last week, writes William Kay. Nationwide and ING Direct have been dropping hints for months that their once-excellent savings deals were too expensive to maintain.

Now both have stepped off their pedestals to join other firms jostling for our business.

They are not the first, and they won’t be the last. Time was when the Co-operative Bank and its Smile online offshoot were bywords for great value. Egg, too, launched with promises that it would break new ground.

Only last month First Direct decided it was worth losing a few friends to implement a hard-nosed decision to charge for current accounts. And Lloyds TSB has quietly abandoned its pledge never to leave a village unbanked.

The disappointment with Nationwide and ING is they adopted a high moral tone that they would set new standards. When ING landed in Britain three years ago, journalists asked how long it would stay at the top of the best-buy tables, and were assured this was no flash in the pan. Now the Dutch bank has taken the weaselly line that “our customers want to relax knowing they don’t have to constantly check best-buy tables”.

On the contrary, after its refusal to raise savings interest in line with Bank rate, I’d have thought its customers would be scanning the best-buy tables with a microscope to look for ING’s name. They’ll have to look a long way down them now.

And Nationwide’s TV ads portrayed its competitors as shysters more concerned with filling their shareholders’ champagne glasses than looking after customers. That looks a little flimsy now it has scrapped the principle that all customers should be treated equally. Like its rivals, newcomers buying homes will get the best deals — at the end of which they are no longer newcomers.

Nationwide hopes that inertia will stop recent arrivals from moving on. If not, exit fees and other ingenious little traps will.

Should we be surprised when our heroes turn out to have feet of clay? Not really, and with instant-access savings accounts like ING’s, if you don’t like the deal, you can always walk.

Nationwide’s lapse is more significant, because it is the standard-bearer for mutuality as opposed to saving with or borrowing from a public limited company answerable to shareholders.

Most building societies rely on low costs and local loyalties to keep the mutual flag flying. Nationwide, bigger than all the other societies put together, does not have that luxury. It is competing with the likes of Halifax, Barclays, HSBC and the rest, but without their financial flexibility.

You can argue that the banks have dragged Nationwide down to their level, or alternatively Nationwide was making promises it could not sustain.

The lesson, despite ING’s claim that its customers can’t be bothered, is to keep checking how well your providers are taking care of you, with an eye for any catches in the small print.

That doesn’t mean hopping from firm to firm at the twitch of a percentage point, unless that’s how you like to spend your time. But you should review your savings and borrowings, including your mortgage, a couple of times a year to make sure you aren’t being taken for granted.

Sadly, too many financial groups are doing just that — and two more joined their ranks last week.

Opaque profits

Pension firms just can’t shake off their addiction to with-profits, despite the criticism rained down on the discredited concept.

Liverpool Victoria has relaunched its with-profits pension annuity with a few tweaks to make it seem more user-friendly.

The biggest change is that the smoothing period for top-up bonuses on annuity payments has been cut from five to two years, so that policyholders will get the benefit more quickly of gains in the fund’s underlying investments. But losses will be transmitted sooner, too.

The real snag, though, is nobody outside the company can see how the profits — and therefore the bonuses — are arrived at. That is why this is a retrograde step.

Roll the dice

Until now, the only chip most people have known in connection with credit cards has been the chip-and-pin campaign by Apacs, the card-issuers’ trade body.

But now Apacs has turned to the chips you find at a virtual roulette table.

A growing number of people use credit cards to gamble online, often without realising the risks they are running. So Apacs has issued a checklist of pitfalls, from ensuring that your card is OK for gambling with, to using only accredited sites.

You can get a copy of the guide at apacs.org.uk.

For more on savings visit www.timesonline.co.uk/savings