The BACS system is completely unacceptable!!

Mikeyorks

Biggles wrote: »

The fact that funds are apparently not debited & credited simultaneously is a red herring, as we all know the bank keep it as a 'float' (interestingly, that's even the word 'the industry' uses for it in 2.13!) before making the transaction.

Sorry Biggles ..... but the fact that SOs / bill payments generate 'float' ..... and Direct Debits and Direct Credits do not ..... points out the fundamental differences. Which is why SOs / bill payments (7% of the total) are mandated to be part of FP (to eliminate that float) - whereas Direct Debits and Direct Credits (93% of the total) are not part of FP, because there is no float to be eliminated. By definition therefore - SOs / bill payments / diarised payments ..... are not Direct Credits as defined by BACS. They use similar routeing but the settlement dates and mechanisms are very different.

I think this page endorses that there is a distinction, where it describes them as very separate entities :-

http://www.apacs.org.uk/payment_options/automated_payments.html

And the settlement aspects of SOs etc go back to the heart of the OP. For the most part Icesave customers didn't get BACS payments because the Bank didn't initiate them. But there are unsubstantiated reports that some Banks did get BACs files from Icesave the following day? Bearing in mind that these are just data files ..... and the real money underpinning them is settled separately .... then the Banks would simply have 'black holed' the files as they knew, by then, that funds would not follow. Had they credited accounts - and then had to countermand the credits several days later - the resultant damage would have been even worse than it currently is.

YorkshireBoy

Thanks Mike, I was fast running out of links!

Mikeyorks

YorkshireBoy wrote: »

Thanks Mike, I was fast running out of links!

..... so was I. As there used to be a schematic, I'm sure, of the BACS system somewhere on the APACS site and showing the data flows plus, critically, the separate settlement flow. But appears to have gone AWOL.