Swithed bank account and now recieving charges

EarthBoy

No bank in the the country can guarantee that a direct debit will be transferred without problems. All they can do is to inform the DD originators (i.e. the companies who collect the payments) about the change of bank account. Whether the originators action the request to make the change is out of the banks' control.

System

The point I was making was that if the new bank was responsible for closing the old account and hence reducing it's balance to zero, then it is the new bank (Lloyds) that made an error because they had not confirmed that ALL Direct Debits were being taken from the new account before they closed the old account. The OP has not yet confirmed who closed the old account, from reading the Lloyds Switching Service process, it seems likely that the OP's gf may have done it ? in which case the bank would not have made an error.

The major difference between the Lloyds switching process and my bank's switching process is that my bank - RBS - actually publish the fact that they include a guarantee, whereas Lloyds do not offer any guarantee (even if they make a mistake) so it may be more difficult to recover any charges even if Lloyds did err.

pqrdef

Never heard of a switching service closing the old account.

Neither the old bank nor the new one can be aware of any contiinuous payment authorities that may exist on debit cards on the old account. It's down to the customer to remember these and contact the merchant.

And neither bank will be aware of any cheques that may have been written but not yet drawn.

Waiting for Direct Debits to be taken from the new account isn't going to work, because the bank has no way of knowing which ones are for annual or irregular payments.

System

pqrdef wrote: »

Never heard of a switching service closing the old account.

Neither the old bank nor the new one can be aware of any contiinuous payment authorities that may exist on debit cards on the old account. It's down to the customer to remember these and contact the merchant.

And neither bank will be aware of any cheques that may have been written but not yet drawn.

Waiting for Direct Debits to be taken from the new account isn't going to work, because the bank has no way of knowing which ones are for annual or irregular payments.

I'm afraid you will find that banks can and do close the old account as part of the switching service, but only if you ask them to close it as part of the service (Since some people may want to retain the old account)

See RBS Day 6-9 step:

What we do (Bank)

• Request your existing bank to close the account and transfer any funds (if requested)

As you say the banks know nothing about continuous payment authority Re: Debit / Credit Cards so obviously these are not part of the switching service and make no difference to this discussion since the bank account holder who requested the switch will have given the new bank their authority to close the old account.

With Direct Debits, the new bank will know the frequency of payments for each Direct Debit Instruction since that forms part of the setup of the instruction and hence they will see when all the regular payments have started to come out of the new account. Any other D/Ds that are not due for some time will be listed on the information the new bank give the account holder as part of the final stage of the process and obviously would be the customer's responsibility to keep an eye on.

The step by step switching process is clearly shown by most banks, and in the past, I personally have been involved in the design of the workflow for a computer system that manages current account switching, hence I do know what I have said, does happen