Has this affected my credit rating?

Tommo99

Hi there,

I have a Nationwide Credit Card and Debit Card (Flex Account), and I visited a branch last month to set up a direct debit in order to pay off my credit card in full each month. My latest payment was due on Friday, 6 weeks since setting up the direct debit, and yet no money was paid across despite plenty being in my debit account. I was therefore charged a £12 fee. I have explained this to Nationwide, and they have given me a £12 refund on to my credit card and have now supposedly set up my direct debit "correctly". I have never missed a payment on anything before and don't want any repercussions from their error. Am I OK?

Thanks!

Tom

Venusflytrap

Similar happened to me with my HSBC CC, only that it was I who assumed that a refunded payment counted as a credit to the account. Nonetheless, because it was my 1st late payment and had been with the bank for a while, they refunded me the late payment fee and also didn't report this to the CFAs.

Just to say that you better call them and request that it not be reported to CFAs as it has been resolved internally and was largely the bank's fault.

Lenders should be making it clear to customers how long setting up DDs should take, and that individual payments should continue to be made until the CC statement confirms that future payments will be taken by DD.

Hax

The only way to be sure is to check your credit reports in a month or two...

With regard to them not taking the payment by DD - what did it say on your statement? Unless that said that the payment would be taken by DD, then you need to continue making manual payments.

lisyloo

My advice would be to get your statutory credit reports for £2 from Equifax and Experian (it might take Nationwide a month to do the updates).
If it's wrong then ask Nationwide to remove the late payment. If they have refunded your £12 then that's implies some willingness on their part to accept some of the blame.

bobbydrake50

You should be ok. I paid MBNA an hour too late on the last day of the month so payment went in a day too late. I rang them straight away and explained why it was late (also promised to keep a better eye on it) - they refunded the £12 and also did not report the payment as late to the CRA's.

chattychappy

Yes, CERTAINLY don't take Nationwide's word that it has not been reported or that a report will be removed. I can tell you this from experience.

Of course, whether you are entitled to have a late payment marker removed really depends on what you were told. The starting point is that if the payment was late, then it was late and it is not necessarily a reflection of fault.

Depending on when they report, they may not have reported this anyway. CCs tend to report the state of the account once a month and it is the state of the account on that date that is relevant.

Even if you did get late marker, it is not the end of the world. If everything else is OK then it will quickly fade in significance. Plenty of "normal" people forget the odd payment, have a DD screw-up or whatever. People who are a bad risk usually have more than one warning sign on the record - eg maxed out cards, multiple late markers, not on electoral roll etc etc.

In my case, there was fraud on a dormant (zero) account (£6800). Once reported they had no problems with my not paying anything. But of course it went late. In the end they credited everything back and said they'd remove any report to a CRA. A few months later when I got an Experian report, there it still was. But it hadn't caused me any problems and I never bothered to follow it up.

tommy8721

If it was only a couple of days late, it shouldn't cause you any problems with credit history - it only causes problems for persistant late payers.

Experian_company_representative

That's right. As long as you rectified the problem within around a week it shouldn't affect your credit reports. However, if it were me I think I'd check just to make sure. You should only need to check one report as they send the same data to the three CRAs.

James Jones