Faster Payment hold up

Archi_Bald

dggar wrote: »

The implication from First Direct that is best not to do test transactions.

This would be silly. What would you rather have - a held up test transaction or losing several hundreds or thousands because you made a mistake?

Several months ago, someone allegedly working for HSBC (owners of FD) posted that HSBC consider £1 test payments as potential fraud as in their view fraudsters typically try £1 first before they send larger sums. So may be they have now made this a group-wide policy. But whether they have or haven't, nobody should be put off from making their own provisions against mistakes.

Gilbo_Baggins

Archi_Bald wrote: »

This would be silly. What would you rather have - a held up test transaction or losing several hundreds or thousands because you made a mistake?

Several months ago, someone allegedly working for HSBC (owners of FD) posted that HSBC consider £1 test payments as potential fraud as in their view fraudsters typically try £1 first before they send larger sums. So may be they have now made this a group-wide policy. But whether they have or haven't, nobody should be put off from making their own provisions against mistakes.

Let's just send £0.01 as a test transaction

Today I sent payments from FD to pay stuff to the parents, first time I'd done that with FD. Was a delay of about 3 hours.

agrinnall

Milarky wrote: »

Sorry, I caused that by getting my dates blurred. The reference to 'Monday' would have been correct if the payment had been sent at 4 pm on a Friday (which it wasn't!) but was release/arrived on a Saturday morning. Saturday counts as Monday at Barclays (that was all I meant to convey) but obviously you have the access to the amount before Monday physically arrives.

Yes, I thought that you'd got your days mixed up, which is why I started my response to your post by saying that this all started on Thursday - the rest of your post made sense apart from the mixed up days. It was Hominu who got it badly wrong by adding your 16 hours and getting a time that was 28 hours later. Luckily Santander sorted it for the OP so we're only quibbling theoretically now :j.

jamesd

dggar wrote: »

The implication from First Direct that is best not to do test transactions.

The correct implication from First Direct is that FD is using as a fraud risk signal something that all prudent customers should be doing routinely. They aren't alone in doing this but as customers become aware that they lose money for data entry errors I assume its false positive rate will increase.

zerog

For me, the only bank (or not, as the case is) which I can rely on to send my money is Nationwide with the card reader.

Lloyds group and Santander have this useless additional step of calling / texting you when you set up a new payee, but they still decide to block your account. Might as well just force you to always call and answer questions which you can't ("how much was your last direct debit to X" "well, if you hadn't blocked my internet banking, I would be able to log in and find out") whenever you want to pay somebody new more than £100.

Archi_Bald

zerog wrote: »

Lloyds group and Santander have this useless additional step of calling / texting you when you set up a new payee, but they still decide to block your account. Might as well just force you to always call and answer questions which you can't ("how much was your last direct debit to X" "well, if you hadn't blocked my internet banking, I would be able to log in and find out") whenever you want to pay somebody new more than £100.

It's not that dramatic, is it. Neither Santander nor Lloyds routinely block your internet banking access if you want to pay someone more than £100. I don't think I have seen anyone reporting that anything got blocked at Lloyds routinely, and with Santander, it's just a delay of a payment to a new payee that happens regularly.

To get your entire internet access blocked something other than a payment to a new payee would be the reason.

masonic

dggar wrote: »

Today when I moved £750 from First Direct to Halifax, First Direct picked it up a possible fraudulent transaction. After speaking with First Direct the funds were released.

I must have set up new payments from my FD account to literally a dozen or more different bank accounts (including 4 different Halifax accounts), in all cases doing a £1 test transaction before performing the desired transfer and I've never encountered this.

Edit: Also, in response to zerog, I've recently opened a couple of new accounts with Lloyds group and therefore set up a lot of new payees and bounce £1500 around them and some other non-Lloyds group account in order to qualify for rewards. Again, no issues. I much prefer the automated calls than having to use a card reader or secure key.

dggar

jamesd wrote: »

The correct implication from First Direct is that FD is using as a fraud risk signal something that all prudent customers should be doing routinely. They aren't alone in doing this but as customers become aware that they lose money for data entry errors I assume its false positive rate will increase.

When I said "the implication from FirstDirect was.. " I meant I was told by the FD representative that it was not a good idea to do the £1 test transaction and had I not done it, my second transaction for £750 would have probably gone through without question.


I did the test transaction 24Hrs before the main transaction.

jamesd

Had you not done it and used the wrong details you'd now be discussing with First Direct how they can't do much to help you to get your £750 back. It makes life easier for them to do something that it isn't sensible for you to do.

SuperHan

Archi_Bald wrote: »

This would be silly. What would you rather have - a held up test transaction or losing several hundreds or thousands because you made a mistake?

I was told EXPLICITLY by Halifax not to do a test payment.

I had set up a new account with Lloyds and wanted to fund it with the full £5k interest-able amount. I made an initial payment of £1 from Halifax, which blocked my account. They told me it was because it was £1. I tried again with £5 and £10, and my account was blocked no less than 5 times.

They told me it was because I was making small transactions and I should just transfer the full amount and that would go through. I was not willing to do that, however - what if I had typed the account number wrong!?

The banks don't seem to buy in to the test payment. My argument was allow the £1 to go, and then block the £5k. At least that's understandable!