RBS / Nat West ATM refunds

opinions4u

I cannot believe they [STRIKE]kept[/STRIKE] [STRIKE]stole[/STRIKE] retained customer funds when the ATM retained cash withdrawn.

That is outrageous.

Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest are paying a total of £10m to 300,000 customers who forgot to take their cash from ATMs, it has emerged.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/dec/18/atm-refunds

I'm reading that HSBC had similar processes.

It's a few years since I've been involved with an ATM but I'm sure the vast majority of these transactions automatically recredited customers.

stclair

How they are going to do it is beyond me :-)

Agricolae

To be honest I'm glad that they did this off their own back without (I hear) any prompting from the FSA.

It was clearly a deficient process which allowed the customers to lose out in the first place but I don't think a bank admitting that it got something wrong on its own initiative and putting it right, is a bad thing.

If the bank hadn't attempted to put things straight then this story wouldn't have appeared, nobody would be any the wiser and RBG Group could have sat on the money. It's funny how the PR about an essentially positive action has been negative. I bet the people who ran that project at RBS must be kicking themselves for wanting to refund customers.

innovate

haha, I might then get back the £200 (+interest) I forgot to take out of an ATM at Heathrow airport arrivals one evening in late 2003, gassing away to the driver who I had on 'meet and greet' after an international business trip.....

At least I remembered to retrieve my card at the time, so I could use it again, lol....... I did realise straight away that I had omitted to take my money but the ATM offered me no option to record this issue, and by next morning, business issues were more important than proving the ATM swallowed my cash. Nobody from the bank ever contacted me either, which is really quite outrageous but to be expected from bankers these days.

lolavix

innovate wrote: »

haha, I might then get back the £200 (+interest) I forgot to take out of an ATM at Heathrow airport arrivals one evening in late 2003, gassing away to the driver who I had on 'meet and greet' after an international business trip.....

At least I remembered to retrieve my card at the time, so I could use it again, lol....... I did realise straight away that I had omitted to take my money but the ATM offered me no option to record this issue, and by next morning, business issues were more important than proving the ATM swallowed my cash. Nobody from the bank ever contacted me either, which is really quite outrageous but to be expected from bankers these days.

Did you not contact the bank? ATM claims are quite simple once logged.

dalesrider

opinions4u wrote: »

I cannot believe they [STRIKE]kept[/STRIKE] [STRIKE]stole[/STRIKE] retained customer funds when the ATM retained cash withdrawn.

That is outrageous.


It's a few years since I've been involved with an ATM but I'm sure the vast majority of these transactions automatically recredited customers.

ALL banks atms work in the same way.....
In fact barclays are well know for when cash is not taken to reverse and then redebit......

The ATM dispute process is a simple one.

Sorry, but if you did not get any cash. Do you not check your statements and think..... I did not get that..... Lets call the bank and check.

Still its nice to take a call from a customer who has got one of these letters. Just before christmas.

stclair.

They have sent card details to other banks and it is upto them to set up a process and give the cash to customers. So in our case that was get a letter drafted up and approved by legal. Then find some staff to work their way through the long list...
It seems that some may have disputed the atm at the time and got the cash back....
But do not look a gift hourse in the mouth :T

kingstreet

I accidentally left some cash in a Barclays machine. I realised about five minutes later. I nipped round to the local NatWest (my bank, different branch) who gave me a ATM dispute report to fill in.

I did it there and then and passed it back to them and the money was credited back to me account a few days later when the machine was re-balanced.

It's not beyond the realms of possibility that the person standing behind you could take any money left, before the machine can take it back in again. Fortunately, that didn't happen in my case.

rb10

Agricolae wrote: »

To be honest I'm glad that they did this off their own back without (I hear) any prompting from the FSA.

It was clearly a deficient process which allowed the customers to lose out in the first place but I don't think a bank admitting that it got something wrong on its own initiative and putting it right, is a bad thing.

If the bank hadn't attempted to put things straight then this story wouldn't have appeared, nobody would be any the wiser and RBG Group could have sat on the money. It's funny how the PR about an essentially positive action has been negative. I bet the people who ran that project at RBS must be kicking themselves for wanting to refund customers.

The FSA would have found out, they do supervise the banks very closely.

It's a negative action, because it should either have not happened in the first place (like with other banks, it should be recredited to the account), or at least not taken them this long to notice.

dalesrider

rb10 wrote: »

The FSA would have found out, they do supervise the banks very closely.

It's a negative action, because it should either have not happened in the first place (like with other banks, it should be recredited to the account), or at least not taken them this long to notice.

Not sure the FSA ever would..... Some of these ATM's are from 2005.
We were going to look at each one and see if it had been disputed at the time and the customer got their money back.
But were told not to waste the time and just get the customers refunded as the money had been passed to us to pass to our customers.
So we have no idea if any were disputed at the time. Best guess is many were and Nat West/RBS are playing safe and refunding ALL.
Expect more from other banks who run atms as well.

doningtonphil

I don't understand the outrage!!!

I worked with the ATM Helpdesk for a large bank some years ago and cash retraction was common, with the cash retracted/not dispensed being separated into a 'purge bin'.

If a customer claimed they had not received the cash (usually by way of a claim form) it would be simple enough to check the purge bin the next time the ATM was balanced. On other occasions the machine wouldn't balance as the cash drawers contained more than they should (the use of new notes or very old notes sometimes meant the machine struggled to dispense).

Either way, if the customer asked and the money was there, they would get it back.

However, there was a commonly known trick of requesting a large amount (say £200) and when it is dispensed grasping the middle section of notes. When the machine retracts the cash as it has not been removed it will think that it has retracted it all. Now of course, the trickster will have been debited the full amount so would have to go through the hoops of contacting his bank to claim the 'missing' money.
If this new system had existed then, life would have been easy for the trickster and this route to 'free money' would have been a lot more popular.

as others have said, it is not exactly tricky to pursue a claim by simply filling out a form and waiting a few days.

What is a OUTRAGE is someone being careless and not paying attention when making a cash transaction and then TRYING TO BLAME SOMEBODY ELSE!!!!!!

Its a bit similar to the OUTRAGE expressed by people who repeatedly use a mchine that is dispensing the wrong amount (i.e. request £20 get £40) -usually because the wrong denomination notes have been put in the wrong cash - and then being debited for the amount they actually received once the bank realised the mistake. For some reason some people dont think that is right either!!!!

opinions4u

doningtonphil wrote: »

I don't understand the outrage!!!

I worked with the ATM Helpdesk for a large bank some years ago and cash retraction was common, with the cash retracted/not dispensed being separated into a 'purge bin'.

If a customer claimed they had not received the cash (usually by way of a claim form) it would be simple enough to check the purge bin the next time the ATM was balanced. On other occasions the machine wouldn't balance as the cash drawers contained more than they should (the use of new notes or very old notes sometimes meant the machine struggled to dispense).

Yet some bank's ATMs were clever enough to issue cash, debit the account, realise that the cash hadn't been taken, recover the cash and immediately reverse the transaction and reimburse the customer.

Without forms. Without the customer having to do anything. It just happened there and then. It was also recorded on the ATMs audit roll. The machine knew exactly what had happened and which customer had been affected. The same applied to LINK customers too.

So I am really struggling to defend RBS and HSBC here. It feels like they have poor technology or are extracting the urine at the expense of customers. I think the latter.

Either way, if the customer asked and the money was there, they would get it back.

I highlight this sentence. Are you saying that it's fair, right, moral and even legal for the bank to keep money that they can identify as belonging to somebody else?

Are you saying that, even knowing which customer it is who failed to collect the cash, the bank should simply stick it in their back pocket and keep it unless asked?

To me it's a dishonest business practice. That's the nicest name I can give it. Incompetence is one thing. This seems to be on a different level. Theft? Fraud? Is there another word for it?

However, there was a commonly known trick of requesting a large amount (say £200) and when it is dispensed grasping the middle section of notes. When the machine retracts the cash as it has not been removed it will think that it has retracted it all. Now of course, the trickster will have been debited the full amount so would have to go through the hoops of contacting his bank to claim the 'missing' money.

It's up to the machine operator to have systems and practices in place that ensure this doesn't happen. The ATMs I worked with for 20 years didn't suffer this sort of fraud to any extent that I was ever aware of. I recall tracking the budget lines for 100 branches when I worked in a central office for a period of time. 98 had ATMs that balanced to 99.995% accuracy week in week out. The other two branches ended up having staff members sacked. Customers making fraudulent claims that were paid out didn't happen.

The tiny inaccuracies were invariably £10 or £20 down one fortnight and then, when next balanced, up by the same amount. So break even over multiple balancing cycles. Several hundred thousand pounds going through a machine. No error made by the machine. Any errors were invariably minor and part of a manual balancing process, not routine dispensing of cash.

as others have said, it is not exactly tricky to pursue a claim by simply filling out a form and waiting a few days.

It looks to me like RBS and HSBC have backed themselves into this corner. By forcing customers to fill forms in when they know what has happened and having failed to contact those customers they've tried to pull a fast one.

What is a OUTRAGE is someone being careless and not paying attention when making a cash transaction and then TRYING TO BLAME SOMEBODY ELSE!!!!!!

This doesn't make it ok for the bank to keep the cash. Why on earth would that be the right thing, as an honest organisation, for the bank to do?

Its a bit similar to the OUTRAGE expressed by people who repeatedly use a mchine that is dispensing the wrong amount (i.e. request £20 get £40) -usually because the wrong denomination notes have been put in the wrong cash - and then being debited for the amount they actually received once the bank realised the mistake. For some reason some people dont think that is right either!!!!

And, on the one occasion I experienced this phenomena the bank was able to identify the customers involved and recover most of its cash. It's not right for customers to do this. It's a completely dishonest way or customers to act. But I don't see why it makes it ok for the bank to pocket cash when the shoe is on the other foot.

I understand that machines (and cashiers) make mistakes occasionally. I understand that it's not always possible to prove what has happened. But in this case some banks were able to operate ATM software that did the right thing. Others were able to identify what the right thing was but required the customer to go through a bureaucratic process to trigger the right outcome. If that process wasn't triggered they just kept the cash.

I'll defend a bank's right to trade. To charge fees. Interest. Make profits. Strong and profitable banks are good for the economy and usually good for customers too.

Corporate [STRIKE]theft[/STRIKE] gain by skimming customer accounts in this way cannot be seen as acceptable business practice by any right minded person.