Smile credits and debits

katyp

Puzzled.I arranged for a transfer of cash from another account into my Smile bank account last Monday, which was showing on my account first thing Monday morning.
On the same day, two mortgage payments were due to leave my account, which Smile have bounced due to 'insufficient funds'.
The credit and the debits both came in overnight on Sunday night, how can this be?

opinions4u

You needed to have the funds in the Friday before.

8.1 We may refuse to make a payment out of your account if:

you do not have available money (by way of cleared funds or formal overdraft) in your account at 9pm the business day before to cover payments.

http://www.smile.co.uk/cfscombi/pdf/smile_termsandconditionsjan2012.pdf section 8

pqrdef

katyp wrote: »

two mortgage payments were due to leave my account

Two mortgage payments were due to arrive in your lender's account. And your lender has outgoings as well.

For the system to work your way, all the money would have to arrive before setting off.

You might have fixed this by making the mortgage payments manually by immediate FP during the day. But the automated system isn't programmed to make your payments as and when the funds show up.

They could make a payment run against the overnight balances, and then a second payment run to retry failed payments against money received during the night. But then they'd need a third run against money received in the second run, and so on.

Of course a more sensible way would be to process your personal payment queue whenever money is credited to your account. But that's got no resemblance to the medieval way that banks process payments.

realaledrinker

What time did you pay into your smile account last Monday. Their system will have run the mortgage direct debits overnight Sunday/Monday leaving you overdrawn at that point. Co-op run pay/no pay decisions at 8am so I imagine the mortgage payments had been bounced before you credited the account. Hence the T&C to have sufficient funds in the account at close of play on the previous business day.