Santander and SLOWER payments

tdwdotnet

Online, I recently transferred a small amount from a Santander (ex Abbey) current account to an RBoS current account. Santander took the money from my account immediately and it took 5 day to arrive - so it was MIA and losing interest until it arrived at RBoS, I then transferred a small amount back from the RBoS account to the Santander account and it took less than 10 mins to show up in the Santander account (online)

I figure Santander must be using the faster-payments system in order to be able to receive it so quickly, so is it worth me complaining to Santander over missing interest and the practice of hiding my money for 5 days?

Gary1963

I had the same experiance when moving some money from Barclays to my E Saver. Went straight in. When I moved some back took days!!

slup_2

Given that it was a small amount and the fact that most current accounts now pay either no interest or an absolutely minimal amount, how much interest do you think you have lost?

Probably a fraction of a penny and certainly not worth your time and effort in complaining.

Rochdale_Pioneers

This time you lost pennies in interest. Next time it could be a bill payment they lose! Why take the chance?

tdwdotnet

Yeah I know I lost no interest really, it was only a token £1 each way as a test after a *much* larger transfer to Egg took even longer. Apparently Santander's upper limit for Faster-Payments is £300, so I definitely expected this transfer to be completed much more quickly.

The delay is really what I had the issue with. It took longer that the 3 days I would expect without faster payments, and the potential for lost interest / charges for going overdrawn etc is increased.

AND.......Santander must be making a tidy amount on saved interest across all their transactions by having this money disappear for a few days.

[Deleted User]

must have been sent via BACS as their FPS doesn't work most of the time

naked

Santander don't send faster payments if you do it online. For me, that means phoning them up to do it.
I don't know if you can send it from a branch or not (if your account allows branch access).

The sort code checker on the Chaps Co. website will tell you if an account can receive a faster payment, and the tables on their website tells you which banks can send them and the limits.

If you complain to them, you'll probably get a standard sob story reply saying how much trouble they have had integrating Abbey and A&L systems and that's why they haven't got around to sorting out faster payments properly yet.