Faster Payments Service - NOW

theloft

Have you tried the Faster Payments Service yet ? This offers a near instant transfer of funds from your bank to another account, providing you have the sort code and account number of the account you are transferring money to.. This service has been running in Scandinavia for years, but it only came into being in May of this year in the UK. However the banks are not publicising it, neither is it visibly available on websites. Well it certainly wasn't on Lloyds TSB. I thought I would check it out and they gave me some feeble excuse about, technical problems. But after a protracted conversation on the phone, hey presto! they transferred me to the Phone Banking Service and it was done in a couple of minutes.
Less than 2 hours later the money was in my building society account.
This avoids the 3 to 4 days when the banks have the money but you don't earn any interest. It costs nothing !
You can Google for more information, here is a site with some:-

http://www.bankingtimes.co.uk/27052008-faster-payments-service-begins-roll-out/

Milarky

I love that payments-industry euphemism for incompetence and communication mis-management: Rollout

(It makes them sound like they've developed a new aircraft that can cross the Atlantic in just 2 hours - and certainly less than the 2-day/4 day with weekend stopover in Azores it takes in the 40 year-old Bristol BAC-a-zon)

whu

theloft wrote: »

Have you tried the Faster Payments Service yet ? This offers a near instant transfer of funds from your bank to another account, providing you have the sort code and account number of the account you are transferring money to.. This service has been running in Scandinavia for years, but it only came into being in May of this year in the UK. However the banks are not publicising it, neither is it visibly available on websites. Well it certainly wasn't on Lloyds TSB. I thought I would check it out and they gave me some feeble excuse about, technical problems. But after a protracted conversation on the phone, hey presto! they transferred me to the Phone Banking Service and it was done in a couple of minutes.
Less than 2 hours later the money was in my building society account.
This avoids the 3 to 4 days when the banks have the money but you don't earn any interest. It costs nothing !
You can Google for more information, here is a site with some:-

http://www.bankingtimes.co.uk/27052008-faster-payments-service-begins-roll-out/

There are various threads on the site dealing with peoples experiences with the FP service - In my experience with Lloyds there have been times that it has worked when doing it on line and others when it has not - recently it has worked using phone banking but I have had previous experiences when it has not - hopefully it will continue to work with phone banking - the last 2 times I have used it the money has gone through in 2 minutes

theloft

whu wrote: »

There are various threads on the site dealing with peoples experiences with the FP service - In my experience with Lloyds there have been times that it has worked when doing it on line and others when it has not - recently it has worked using phone banking but I have had previous experiences when it has not - hopefully it will continue to work with phone banking - the last 2 times I have used it the money has gone through in 2 minutes

I had not seen any discussions about this service, and don't think it has been mentioned in Martin MSE's weekly email. This was the first time I had used the service and the money may well have gone through in a couple of minutes. I did not check until 2 hours later. It really is a scandal that this service is not freely available.

Lokolo

Titanic Sinks

ShelfStacker_3

Lokolo wrote: »

Titanic Sinks

Obvious stated?

Extant

theloft wrote: »

It really is a scandal that this service is not freely available.

It is freely available. There's no cost for using the service.

That said, the service is new and is not used for all payments yet. Contrary to the belief of many people, setting up an entirely new payment system for a country with billions of pounds of transactions every day is actually quite complex and difficult.

As such, some banks are not currently enabled or fully enabled at this point. There is a phenomenal cost to all of this, and then there's fraud/security considerations, etc.

lesley1960

We have 2 busines bank accounts , Barclays , sometimes the bacs get there faster sometimes they still take the 3 days , this wednesday the person doing the wages bacs run noticed her wages appeared in her halifax account with in minutes .
Bank of Scotland have just announced they are part of the scheme , but not entirely sure the fp is done automatically its not clear how it works there

Sam_G_3

You would have thought that this system could have been developed years ago. While this money is in 'transit' obviously the sender or receiver of the money don't earn any interest on it, but what about the banks themselves?

mpr555

Sorry if this is a question with an obvious answer, but when the banks say that ordinary bill payments take 3 days, does the day the money goes out count as the 1st day or is it the day after? e.g. if the money leaves my account on Monday does it reach the recipient on Wednesday or Thursday?

Milarky

mpr555 wrote: »

Sorry if this is a question with an obvious answer, but when the banks say that ordinary bill payments take 3 days, does the day the money goes out count as the 1st day or is it the day after? e.g. if the money leaves my account on Monday does it reach the recipient on Wednesday or Thursday?

'Three (working days) does mean 'two-days-later' as you have surmised - not 'three-days-later' - since the day of payment and receipt are counted as separate 'days' (but there's no additional time involved)