Egg - transferring money out software bug

Dagobert

MarkyMarkD wrote:

It would be very useful to know if the account number is actually irrelevant for these collection accounts, and you can always put 9999 9999 instead. I look forward to more confirmations that this actually works!

Not necessarily: I asked the Derbyshire building society (who uses a 00000000 collection account to receive payments for the regular saver) whether a different account number could be used. The answer was no.

Kazza242

Dagobert wrote:

A word of warning:

The Egg interface allows you to set up withdrawals to other accounts.

However, their software has an interesting "feature" that you should be aware of: you cannot transfer money to an account with an account number of 8 zeroes (0000 0000). This is absolutely ridiculous as there are accounts with 8 zeroes. I have come across three in the past few months:

You can set such an account up in your account address book, but the transfer will fail. Don't try to be clever and phone the transfer in: the software they use has the same problem!

This is a long standing problem Egg have had with "0000 0000" accounts. I first found out about it in March last year when I opened both a Derbyshire regular saver and an Egg account. Like you, I was feeding my Derbyshire account from my Egg savings. I ended up having to move money from Egg to my current account and then transfer it onto the Derbyshire. Of course this increased the transfer time it took to reach it's intended destination.

This is one of the main drawbacks to having an Egg account, which is why I transferred my savings away from Egg and put them in Cahoot's 5.65% account. I've been asked to fill out a number of Egg surveys on what I think of their savings account and I have repeatedly mentioned the "00000000" problem. It's very disappointing that they've not taken customers' comments on board and done something about it.

Dagobert

It might be a policy decision not to allow transfers to collection accounts, which require information in the reference field for the receiving bank to be able to allocate the money.

However, it is rather poor that one can create an address book entry on Egg for a 0000 0000 account without warning and that one gets a non-descript error message when attempting the transfer.

This is odd as otherwise I have found their online support superb.

A tip I got from the Derbyshire though: if you send them a cheque, they give you interest from the date of receipt of the cheque, which is days before it comes off the current account. If the c/a is interest bearing you'll be getting double interest.