are transfers between A&L accounts instant?

Dagobert

Thank you, MarkyMarkD, for your excellent answer including all the useful info I hadn't asked for. This is exactly what I had suspected from my previous experience.

YorkshireBoy: thank you for experimenting with the online interface.

Does any of you know when A&L's cut-off point is?

Not being able to make instant transfers, for instance between couples, is yet another reason not to use A&L "for real". I had taken this feature for granted from my experience with BoS/Halifax, where internal transfers between personal and business accounts held at the same branch are instantly available for all purposes.

MarkyMarkD

YorkshireBoy wrote:

Hmmm, very strange. The online help file says......but you say the example in the first paragraph is sent by BACS - unless requested by phone?

Yes. Only transfers between linked accounts take any speedy route, when done online. But if you phone up, and make it clear it's another A&L account, and provide the 9 digit account number, they'll process it as an internal transfer.

YorkshireBoy

Dagobert, an update...

Despite requesting the transfers shortly after 11:30pm, for transfer on Monday 24th July (ie yesterday), they are currently (at 12:15am) residing in the 'payments pending' section. Presumably they will be actioned later tonight.

However, and you may find this interesting, the A&L 'system' has indeed recognised the payees as A&L current accounts and automatically added the last digit of the sort code to form a 9 digit account number in the 'To' column header.

Will feed back further details tomorrow (or the day after as the case may be).

MarkyMarkD

Dagobert wrote:

Not being able to make instant transfers, for instance between couples, is yet another reason not to use A&L "for real". I had taken this feature for granted from my experience with BoS/Halifax, where internal transfers between personal and business accounts held at the same branch are instantly available for all purposes.

That depends on your personal circumstances.

My wife and I have one joint current account, and lots and lots of different A&L savings accounts in our separate names. We can transfer between all of them using online banking, as long as we log in using the relevant userID.

The only problem arises if you have single current accounts - AFAIK you can't then transfer instantly between them online and you'd have to phone.

If you had a joint account, too, you could use that as a conduit, but I'd recommend leaving a day between the two transfers which rather defeats the object.

MarkyMarkD

YorkshireBoy wrote:

Dagobert, an update...

Despite requesting the transfers shortly after 11:30pm, for transfer on Monday 24th July (ie yesterday), they are currently (at 12:15am) residing in the 'payments pending' section. Presumably they will be actioned later tonight.

However, and you may find this interesting, the A&L 'system' has indeed recognised the payees as A&L current accounts and automatically added the last digit of the sort code to form a 9 digit account number in the 'To' column header.

Will feed back further details tomorrow (or the day after as the case may be).

Stone me. Or words to that effect.

I can see, looking back at an old transfer to my brother's A&L account, that it has also created a 9 digit account number. I didn't find out from him how quickly the funds were transferred.

I would not be surprised if the transaction isn't processed later tonight (this morning) - I will be interested to hear the outcome.

YorkshireBoy

MarkyMarkD wrote:

I would not be surprised if the transaction isn't processed later tonight (this morning) - I will be interested to hear the outcome.

Well, the transaction sat in my 'pending payments' list all the next day (Tuesday), and disappeared from this list late on Tuesday evening (around 22:30, which was an hour earlier than the time I made my request the previous evening).

The funds were available to me on Wednesday morning, so it appears that it does indeed work as per the first paragraph in my quote from the online help in post #11, for all A&L current accounts - whether they're your own or not.

I suspect that if I'd made the request earlier (say up to 18:30 as per Barclays, or possibly even up to 22:00 or so?) on Monday, then the money would indeed have been available first thing Tuesday morning.

MarkyMarkD

Thanks for this info, YB.