Your newspaper article has captions about an organisation called IVObank. While it does offer the 2.5% you talk about, it only offers this on balances up to £9,999. As your article is about pensioners living on savings, this is a critical point to miss. You may be protected up to £50,000, but you will not earn 2.5% on most of it.

See http://www.ivobank.com/ivobanksavingsaccount.html or contact Customer Services.

I did and eventually got them to confirm.

Cheers,

J