Barclays Guaranteed Payments

gazfocus

On 2 occasions this week I have had letters from the bank saying that they have received a transaction for x amount and as it was a guaranteed payment they have paid it and will be charging me an £8 fee (the most recent one was only for £8.32).

What I don't understand is I always check my online banking before using my card (which is just a bog standard debit card) and always have enough money to cover any purchase (or so I thought) but the only reason I can see that might be causing this is the banking system being slow.

Anyway, is there any way I can appeal these fees or stop Barclays from allowing so called 'Guaranteed payments' as I don't have the kind of money to throw away £16?

Thanks in advance

DizzleUK

If it is just your maths that is bad and you miscalculated how much was in your account when you made the payments then yes, the 2 x £8 charges will stand (be thankful it's not 2 x £25 payments as you find with other banks!)

You could try phoning them and pleading ignorance/stupidity/insanity but I doubt you'll get very far, but as they say, if you don't ask you don't get.

In future, why not set up a basic spreadsheet and enter every payment you make on your account, and use it as a reference against your online banking (which as you state yourself, is not always 100% up to date).

Oh, and if they didn't pay the "guaranteed payment" they would charge you £8 for not paying it and you'd end up with troubles with who the payment was for (and depending on who you were paying may have their own late payment/bounced payment fees), so it's the lesser of 2 evils.

gazfocus

DizzleUK wrote: »

If it is just your maths that is bad and you miscalculated how much was in your account when you made the payments then yes, the 2 x £8 charges will stand (be thankful it's not 2 x £25 payments as you find with other banks!)

You could try phoning them and pleading ignorance/stupidity/insanity but I doubt you'll get very far, but as they say, if you don't ask you don't get.

In future, why not set up a basic spreadsheet and enter every payment you make on your account, and use it as a reference against your online banking (which as you state yourself, is not always 100% up to date).

Oh, and if they didn't pay the "guaranteed payment" they would charge you £8 for not paying it and you'd end up with troubles with who the payment was for (and depending on who you were paying may have their own late payment/bounced payment fees), so it's the lesser of 2 evils.

Thanks for your reply. It may be that my maths is bad but that's why I check my online banking every time. On my online banking I have a 'last nights balance' and a 'current cleared balance'. If there's money to spend then it'll be in the 'current cleared balance' so I don't understand why the bank then say I didn't have enough.

Also when I said about stopping the bank making the payments, these are debit card payments, not direct debits so if the money isn't there, they SHOULDN'T let me use the card. That's what most banks do which is why I don't get it.

DizzleUK

It's not necessarily the bank that's authorised the payments. If you have a full current account with a full Visa Debit card, not all payments are authorised online at the time of use.

I'll give you an example....

On Saturday, my account with A&L was being transferred to Santander, so not everything with my account was working properly. I went into Morrisons and made a purchase of £9.82, card went through fine and I took my shopping home. The money was not deducted (not even removed from the "available balance" for a few days before clearing completely as normal- am I making sense here?) until yesterday (Wednesday).

If I had gone to the cash machine on Monday I could have withdrawn that money or made another purchase no problem, and on Wednesday my account would have been pushed overdrawn by the transaction I made on Saturday.

A lot of shops have a "floor limit" whereby transactions under this limit do not always need to be authorised by the bank at the time of purchase.

I think a similar situation has happened to you.

If you think this may cause you similar problems in the future, ask Barclays to issue you a Visa Debit card that forces an online authorisation every time you use the card (bear in mind that if part of the autorisation system is offline at the time your purchase will be declined).