Santander !!! - Card Payment delays

danmun

Hi,
1st time on here and wonder if anyone can help me.
I bank with Santander and have done so for over 15 years and have had more issues with them in the past 2 years than ever before.

The latest bug bear for me has been this:

At the weekend I chec nmy available balance online and it said I had £180 available. I then bought some bits totalling £90 on Saturday and Sunday. I then checked my balance today and I was £33 overdrawn. It appears that I bought a variety of things on my card over the 11th, 12th and 13th June, 10 days ago, and it has taken those companies 10 days to take the money from my bank, this sending me overdrawn.

My bug bear is the fact that why didn't my bank account take these amounts into consideration when showing my "available" balance this weekend, then I wouldn't have gone out and bought what I did.

Santander said today that a "merchant" has 3 days to collect the money but then if they don't it is credited back to my account and they have up to 6 months to take the money!!

Can anyone tell me if this sounds right/fair or if there is anyway I can challenge this?

Thanks for reading

Dan

Sceptic001

The moral of this story is surely to take responsibility and keep a check on your own spending.

Sorry if that is not what you wanted to hear!

pmduk

danmun wrote: »

My bug bear is the fact that why didn't my bank account take these amounts into consideration when showing my "available" balance this weekend, then I wouldn't have gone out and bought what I did.

You spent the money, why didn't you keep a better track of it? For once I'm on Santander's side, I doubt it'll ever happen again. Every bank operates the way Santander has done on this occasion. Have you considered keeping a little notebook with your transactions listed?

lemon53

danmun wrote: »

Hi,
1st time on here and wonder if anyone can help me.
I bank with Santander and have done so for over 15 years and have had more issues with them in the past 2 years than ever before.

The latest bug bear for me has been this:

At the weekend I chec nmy available balance online and it said I had £180 available. I then bought some bits totalling £90 on Saturday and Sunday. I then checked my balance today and I was £33 overdrawn. It appears that I bought a variety of things on my card over the 11th, 12th and 13th June, 10 days ago, and it has taken those companies 10 days to take the money from my bank, this sending me overdrawn.

My bug bear is the fact that why didn't my bank account take these amounts into consideration when showing my "available" balance this weekend, then I wouldn't have gone out and bought what I did.

Santander said today that a "merchant" has 3 days to collect the money but then if they don't it is credited back to my account and they have up to 6 months to take the money!!

Can anyone tell me if this sounds right/fair or if there is anyway I can challenge this?

Thanks for reading

Dan

Hi Dan I sympathise with you fully as the same has happened to me. At the end of every day I check my available balance with what I have spent during the day and it always works out to the penny. Today I find my available balance has dropped by hundreds which was for transactions on the dates you mention. Now I checked my balance every time on these dates and the amounts I used my card for had come off. I always check what is available before I use my card. CanI get anyone to understand that at Santander. NO. They say it didnt come off each time the card was used and I say it did. If I had spent hundreds I would be the first to query why my balance did not tally with what I had spent, it always added up. The last time I checked my account was last night and it was correct. This morning it has had a fortune taken off supposedly for transactions that didnt come off at the time as far back as ten days ago. i have had nothing but problems with santander and this is the worst. They wont listen and think you are stupid. Everything gets blamed on technical errors. Well who feeds the information in in the first place?:mad:

Nod_Nolan

and the same happened to me. Logged on to look at my bank account this evening and had two Sainsbury's Transactions come out dated back to the weekend of the 11/12 of June.

This sounds like it is a Santander problem not any of the individual shops.

looking back through my account everything went chronologically but skipped ANY payments on the 11th or 12th of June.

Fair Enough I spent the money, but when the "available balance" on the online banking has ALWAYS been accurate before, ALWAYS removing the minutest debit card payment instantaneously, complaceny means you take tha "available balance" as gospel.

I believe Santander had a problem and they should have posted a warning on their website that payments for the weekend had not been debited correctly. But then, I suppose they'll get a little boost of "fee's" from this little debacle.

thatsean

And the stupid tax strikes again.

I wonder what the point of this forum is at times...( shakes head)

MCLF

Having read your post I went and checked my account - yes, I've had a payment for the 12th showing up only today.

When debit cards were first introduced I believed the whole point was that as soon as you used them to pay for goods or services, that amount was deducted from your account immediately so you couldn't spend what you didn't have.

This happened with my Abbey account. My transactions took a few days to show up in my online account but the amounts were deducted from my balance immediately.

Then Santander took over - and even though I keep a very close eye on my transactions, I was initially caught out because only some debit payments went out immediately, and it took me a while to understand what was happening.

I can't answer your question, OP, but I wanted you to know I share your frustration!! :mad:

pmduk

Can any of the posters on this forum explain why they didn't know that their own transaction hadn't been debited?

Nod_Nolan

pmduk wrote: »

Can any of the posters on this forum explain why they didn't know that their own transaction hadn't been debited?

As I said in post 5, if the available balance has always been correct before. You would not expect the mistake to be made.

girlonaswing_2

This situation is actually a little more complicated I think.

I settled a credit card bill via an automated system using my debit card on 12th June and it came off my available balance straight away (as it always does) and remained as an uncleared item for 3 days after which the amount (and it wasn't a small amount) was credited back to my account. I rang Santander straight away and was told that this was due to my credit card issuer not collecting the money.

I checked my credit card statement online and it showed that my acount had been cleared so I called them was told that as far as they were concerned the payment had gone through but once I told them that I banked with Santander the lady on the phone groaned and said they would suspend all charges and interest on the credit card until it was sorted out.

Since then I have called Santander on several occasions to be repeatedly told that it was nothing to do with them until today when surprise surprise it finally went through and they admitted that Visa debit transactions between 9th and 12th June hadn't been processed. They couldn't say why and couldn't explain why they are so useless that a) they didn't realise there was a problem and b) had continued to tell me (and I'm sure others) in a totally beligerant way that they was nothing they could do.

I'm far from stupid and check my balance every day like posters above and they are right that this has never happened before. It is no excuse for going overdrawn but I can sympathise with them.

Santander are useless, useless, useless BUT I have been promised a £25 credit as an apology, I won't beleive it until it arrives.

Wallhart

I noticed this happening too. Didnt matter as had enough money. Please cut the condesending rubbish about checking your account every 5 mins. Yopu must life one hell of a live if you check every single bit of expenditure across all your accounts every hour.

Anyway it is a problem but for me where Santander have really kicked one is their bank fees. Basically they make sure they take it out a day before pay day. Having transferred most surplus money into savings I am usually down to the wire on the day before pay day. I always saw it as budgeting well. Yes I can budget for it but thats not my issue.

How can I trust a bank who goes out their way to trip you up. Seriously starting to get on my nerves and I am starting to consider moving to a different bank. Maybe Barclays.