Refunding Bank Transfer to wrong details

stclair

dalesrider wrote: »

Well if you had said which question

They have got protection.
If its to a incorrect account, which is not open. Then its sat in a internal holding account at the recieving bank. It is then their responsibilty to return it to the sending bank.
If it get sent to a active account, but not the right one. Then the recieving bank would be asked by the sending bank to contact account holder and ask for the funds to be returned.

So in the OP's case it could well be sat back with santander in a internal account waiting to be put back to his account.

I know we work reports on a daily basis of failed DD's, S/O's & faster payments.
These are returned to the sending bank with the reason why it has been returned. These are usually within 2 days. But can be longer if another bank has changed something.
One month we had well over a thousand DD etc to bounce back due to another bank changing their details.
All this is done manually to ensure that customers have not resolved the issue themselves.

I was thinking to prevent it from happening in the first place

Modulus check maybe to see if the details are correct before the consumer sends the payment.

innovate

stclair wrote: »

I was thinking to prevent it from happening in the first place

Quite.

stclair wrote: »

Modulus check maybe to see if the details are correct before the consumer sends the payment.

Not only is it staggering that the Faster Payments implementation does not appear to include basic checking like modulus check - - it's even more staggering that they didn't take the opportunity to implement a real check.

In many cases, the receiving bank can credit the money within seconds, so be definition, they would know within seconds (or fractions thereof) whether the account number exists.

If neither modulus check / real check find the account number, at the minimum the user should get a big red warning message, like: "Account number and sort code combination not found. Are you certain you have entered correct information?" Yes - Proceed, No - Back.

This is so dead easy to implement, and most likely costs a lot less than having armies of people manually going through lists, and taking days to do so. Plus, it would give the customer better service (but who cares about customers in banks).

Of course, this would still not solve the issue of wrong payments into genuinely existing accounts - see o4u's earlier suggestion for that case.

dalesrider

stclair wrote: »

I was thinking to prevent it from happening in the first place

Modulus check maybe to see if the details are correct before the consumer sends the payment.

Quote from the faster payments site
Linky

Payments are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The system provides a positive response to the customer bank within 15 seconds, and providing a reason for any rejected payment

So a system, of sorts, is in place. But perhaps all some banks do is look at the sort code (Oh, its ours ) and then sort out any account errors afterwards.
Given the 15 secs for a reply. Then to most banks it is not a option to check ALL valid sort/accounts in that time frame.

Given I guess that there is a time limit on the transaction going through. Like a card payment has to be authorised or rejected in 10 secs or it is processed as fallback automatically.
So maybe faster payments have the same sort of fallback system if no response is recieved.

innovate

dalesrider wrote: »

Given the 15 secs for a reply. Then to most banks it is not a option to check ALL valid sort/accounts in that time frame.

15 seconds is like several eternities for a properly written program, even if a slow network connection is involved.

dalesrider

innovate wrote: »

15 seconds is like several eternities for a properly written program, even if a slow network connection is involved.

True it is.
But this program has to intergrate with every banks system. most of which are diffrent.
Banks have enough issues with getting their own internal systems to talk to each other. let alone a 3rd party program. That has to scan every sort code and then every account to see if its a valid one.

In reality. I think ALL banks need a wholesale overhaul of ALL systems. But that is never going to happen for several reasons. The last of which is cost.

stclair

innovate wrote: »

Quite.



Not only is it staggering that the Faster Payments implementation does not appear to include basic checking like modulus check - - it's even more staggering that they didn't take the opportunity to implement a real check.

In many cases, the receiving bank can credit the money within seconds, so be definition, they would know within seconds (or fractions thereof) whether the account number exists.

If neither modulus check / real check find the account number, at the minimum the user should get a big red warning message, like: "Account number and sort code combination not found. Are you certain you have entered correct information?" Yes - Proceed, No - Back.

This is so dead easy to implement, and most likely costs a lot less than having armies of people manually going through lists, and taking days to do so. Plus, it would give the customer better service (but who cares about customers in banks).

Of course, this would still not solve the issue of wrong payments into genuinely existing accounts - see o4u's earlier suggestion for that case.

The RBSG system does this if the details are entered incorrectly.

I do not understand why it could not be implemented industry wide.

innovate

stclair wrote: »

I do not understand why it could not be implemented industry wide.

Actually, may be they all do - - - we might all just follow some red herring by thinking they don't, based on a handful of posts that report wrong payments. These reports must represent a tiny little fraction of the total number of Faster Payments carried out every day. And all we have to go by is what the poster says. Mind you, there is dalesrider talking about the printouts he has to go through manually.....but he was talking more about DDs and SOs (rather than one-off payments made online). I can understand why they would fail at times, because they often have been set up ages ago, and they are executed by relatively ancient systems.

I have made loads of Faster Payments myself since we could make them, never had anything not arrive in the right place (touch wood). I sometimes make £1 "test payments" before I send big amounts, but I always double, triple, quadruple check I actually got the numbers right.

When I next set up a payment to someone, I'll play about with deliberately incorrect account numbers, to see what happens. Of course I won't really send any money to a 'wrong' payee, not knowingly, anyway.

noizeuk

While I see the necessity of getting a erroneous payment back, I don't agree that people should expect the bank to refund the customer. It is clearly not the banks fault and as such should not consider spending employees wages in processing a refund, chasing the payment and keeping their customers updated - who may in fact be lying out of their !!!!.

I admit, the process of getting funds back is not clear. In addition to this, legislation is in the way which allows less freedom of communication between banks (see DPA).

I say, you make a mistake, you pay the consequences. If not this harsh of an approach, the customer should be charged about £25.00 for the privilege.

annie42

I have just posted an up date to my problem with cash going into the wrong account. Barclay's said they could not take the money from the recipients account if there were no funds in it. However they contacted him by phone and he agreed to repay via two standing orders in January and February.