Direct Debit System Totally Flawed - Any Advice Please

tornado77

DD's are fairly safe. If you don't want payments to leave your account after you have cancelled the dd, you can ask your bank to apply an originator id block to the direct debit. This will stop the said company taking payments under that particular originator id and ref number. This lasts for about 13 months and then expires (if a dd is unclaimed after this time, it should drop off the system). If you ask them to process an indemnity claim, they will normally take a day or so, but if you insist they should be able to refund you straight away (the bank could refund you from an internal account etc). DD's can be a pain, but they are better than other methods available such as sto's or card payments.

whitewater_2

pmduk wrote: »

Unfortunately, despite how banks try to sell it to us, direct debits are not for the consumer' benefit.

banks dont sell you direct debits, they act as a middle man and thats it.

Gromitt

pqrdef wrote: »

Of course the merchant sends notifications to the customer, but the merchant has no way of knowing whether the customer is the account holder, and no way of contacting the account holder as such. And it's the account holder who needs to be notified. Obviously, notifications should go via the bank. Guess who doesn't like that idea.

They'd like it if there was a £15 charge for each notification they passed on

To be honest though, I've never had a problem with DD. Once I forgot to notify the company concerned that I'd cancelled the DD at the bank, and a few weeks later I received a later from them informing me of a failed DD and as such I had 7 days to make a payment or my subscription would be cancelled. I did the decent think and rang them up to state I didn't want it anymore and apologised for not letting them know sooner.

Some other companies will try and just setup a new DD for whenever a DD fails - these are upto your bank to cancel (maybe via a block as described above).