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Santander123 Standing Orders: system fault
pafpcg
Posts: 936 Forumite
And nearly two years later, it's still broken!
I can confirm what bhzmac1 found in June 2013 (in a thread on the Credit Card forum) when trying to amend payment reference data: although the Santander123 online system appears to allow you to amend the data in the "Payment Reference" field of a standing order, it won't work!
Back in January, I was closing a regular savings account with a building society and then re-opening a new regular saver. Several building societies still use the old arrangement of a single account (BACS sortcode & account number) for all deposits, identifying each investor's unique account by the roll-number or account number quoted in the payment reference field. Standing orders from my Santander123 current account to deposit the payments every month in my old regular saver worked well for several years, but then when it came to making deposits in my new replacement regular saver, the problem appeared:
Since the BACS sortcode and account number for depositing into the new regular savers was still the same, I thought "why not just change the payment reference field on the existing standing order to the regular saver's new account number and everything will work as smoothly as before?". The Santander123 online system allows the customer to do this - you can change the payee name, the date of payment, the sum paid and the payment reference data; the only thing the customer cannot do is to change the BACS sortcode and account number of the payee. The Santander online system will happily accept the amendments and display a comfirmation screen "Transaction completed successfully". The standing order will be paid (on the correct date with the correct amount) and the Santander bank statement will display the expected date, sum paid, payee name and the amended payment reference.
So everything looks OK, until the building society reports that the payment they have received contains not the expected AMENDED payment reference data, but the ORIGINAL payment reference. I amended another standing order which goes to an HSBC online current account which displays the data in the payment reference; sure enough, it's still the old payment reference.
After much to-ing and fro-ing between me, the building society and Santander, it's finally been acknowledged by Santander that there is indeed a system fault inside their standing order processing. My guess is that when the system was orginally designed, it was decided that the payee sort-code, account number AND payment reference could not be changed, but some bright spark building the web system implemented a web-page to amend standing orders that did allow the user to change the payment reference. That's not really surprising within an IT organisation as large as at Santander, other than that Santander's testing and quality control clearly failed. What I find more disturbing is that the statements for the 123 accounts display the wrong data - they show what should have happened and not what actually did happen.
It seems clear to me that there are two data-bases within Santander, one which displays account data to the customer for statements & standing orders, and one which actually controls the payments; in one of the phone discussions with Santander staff, she reported that on one screen she could see the "amended" payment reference data and on another screen, accessible only to Santander staff, she could see the "original" payment reference data for the same standing order. What does Murphy's Law tell us about what happens when it is assumed that two data-bases will always contain the same identical data?
Conclusion: if you want to change the payment reference for a Santander123 standing order, delete the existing standing order and recreate it with the desired payment reference. No matter what you do, the customer cannot amend the payment reference data and the standing order will always be paid using the payment reference data supplied at the time of the standing order's original creation. At least until such time as Santander fix their system......
I can confirm what bhzmac1 found in June 2013 (in a thread on the Credit Card forum) when trying to amend payment reference data: although the Santander123 online system appears to allow you to amend the data in the "Payment Reference" field of a standing order, it won't work!
Back in January, I was closing a regular savings account with a building society and then re-opening a new regular saver. Several building societies still use the old arrangement of a single account (BACS sortcode & account number) for all deposits, identifying each investor's unique account by the roll-number or account number quoted in the payment reference field. Standing orders from my Santander123 current account to deposit the payments every month in my old regular saver worked well for several years, but then when it came to making deposits in my new replacement regular saver, the problem appeared:
Since the BACS sortcode and account number for depositing into the new regular savers was still the same, I thought "why not just change the payment reference field on the existing standing order to the regular saver's new account number and everything will work as smoothly as before?". The Santander123 online system allows the customer to do this - you can change the payee name, the date of payment, the sum paid and the payment reference data; the only thing the customer cannot do is to change the BACS sortcode and account number of the payee. The Santander online system will happily accept the amendments and display a comfirmation screen "Transaction completed successfully". The standing order will be paid (on the correct date with the correct amount) and the Santander bank statement will display the expected date, sum paid, payee name and the amended payment reference.
So everything looks OK, until the building society reports that the payment they have received contains not the expected AMENDED payment reference data, but the ORIGINAL payment reference. I amended another standing order which goes to an HSBC online current account which displays the data in the payment reference; sure enough, it's still the old payment reference.
After much to-ing and fro-ing between me, the building society and Santander, it's finally been acknowledged by Santander that there is indeed a system fault inside their standing order processing. My guess is that when the system was orginally designed, it was decided that the payee sort-code, account number AND payment reference could not be changed, but some bright spark building the web system implemented a web-page to amend standing orders that did allow the user to change the payment reference. That's not really surprising within an IT organisation as large as at Santander, other than that Santander's testing and quality control clearly failed. What I find more disturbing is that the statements for the 123 accounts display the wrong data - they show what should have happened and not what actually did happen.
It seems clear to me that there are two data-bases within Santander, one which displays account data to the customer for statements & standing orders, and one which actually controls the payments; in one of the phone discussions with Santander staff, she reported that on one screen she could see the "amended" payment reference data and on another screen, accessible only to Santander staff, she could see the "original" payment reference data for the same standing order. What does Murphy's Law tell us about what happens when it is assumed that two data-bases will always contain the same identical data?
Conclusion: if you want to change the payment reference for a Santander123 standing order, delete the existing standing order and recreate it with the desired payment reference. No matter what you do, the customer cannot amend the payment reference data and the standing order will always be paid using the payment reference data supplied at the time of the standing order's original creation. At least until such time as Santander fix their system......
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