What is a Standing Order?

Your final paragraph suggests replacing one standing order (from one bank) to another standing order (from another bank) - that isn't any difference as far as the recipient is concerned.

I also doubt that any bank which receives money into a regular savings account cares whether it's a one-off BACS transfer or a standing order. As far as matters to the recipient, a standing order is just a set of recurring BACS transfers.

black-saturn wrote:

It's like a direct debit except that the amount is standing.

That's a popular misconception. A Direct Debit is a mechanism for a company to take money from an account. They company request the money from your account, your bank make the decision whether to pay it or not, and then the funds are released from your account. A Standing Order is something you can put in place to send money from your account. That's one of the key differences (if not the key difference). A DD can be for a regular amount, not necessarily different amounts every time (for example, a lot of power companies claim the same amount on a DD every month. BT do this also).

As an aside, another widely-held misconception is that a DD is used for companies to send money back to your account. This is also wrong. If a company sends money directly back to your account, this will be actioned via BACS, and cannotbe actioned using a DD mandate.

To answer the question of the first post: Yes, a Standing Order is just a repeated BACS transfer (in the case of transfers between different banks *), and the recipient would have no way of knowing whether a credit into an account was part of an SO or a BACS.

* I make this distinction because an SO set up, say, from my fd current account to my fd savings account or my friend's HSBC account doesn't use BACS, as it's 'internal'.

Caped_Avenger wrote:

As an aside, another widely-held misconception is that a DD is used for companies to send money back to your account. This is also wrong. If a company sends money directly back to your account, this will be actioned via BACS, and cannot be actioned using a DD mandate.

Well, not quite. There is such a think as a "direct credit" which is the exact reverse of a DD - usually used for salary payments. The difference between that and BACS is that it is (usually?) same-day value for payer and recipient. You are quite right, though, that MOST (not all) refunds on DDs are sent via BACS, not via DC.