Consolidating accounts: Debit appears days before credit!

osiangwynedd

I have two Cash ISAs with Santander and via online bankling put in a request on 6th April to consolidate them by transferring all funds out of one and into the other. I put the date that this was to happen as 7th April. The money disappeared from the source account promptly on 7th April, but as of the evening of 8th April the money hadn't appeared in the destination account.

I rang the helpline and was told it was a "back office" process to do the consolidation and it may take 4 days.

Is this practice acceptable? In this situation, do banks generally and automatically backdate the interest for the missing days when I apparently didn't own the money? Obviously, it's not a lot to me personally, but the money must be somewhere earning someone some interest, and if it's the bank that's doing that for everyone...

bowlhead99

They still have your money. So it will arrive in the new account, together with the interest they owe you on the old account for the time it was officially in the old account, and will start to earn interest from the time it is officially in the new account. There won't be any time it is officially in no account.

In the old days when you only got statements once a week or month or whenever you could be bothered to go into the branch with your passbook, this wasn't an issue.But now everyone has the internet, they think they ought to get all their account data in real time by the millisecond with zero time taken for back office work or checking to be carried out. Nothing to lose sleep over- phoning the bank or posting on forums is time you could better spend on happier things!

If you get to the end of the year and have been underpaid, that's the time to complain.

osiangwynedd

Thank you for the answer, but actually in the age of computers and internet and electronic transfers I would actually expect things to happen instantly (especially if the debit happened instantly) and actiually it is worth losing sleep over and phoning the bank if £18,000 suddenly goes inexplicably missing for two days, with no explanation that the first part of the transfer happens instantly but the second part is put in a queue to be handled manually.

It's also queries like this that could unearth a bug in their systems or something suspect going on at the banks. I mean, that couldn't possibly happen could it?

eskbanker

osiangwynedd wrote: »

I rang the helpline and was told it was a "back office" process to do the consolidation and it may take 4 days.

Is this practice acceptable?

osiangwynedd wrote: »

Thank you for the answer, but actually in the age of computers and internet and electronic transfers I would actually expect things to happen instantly (especially if the debit happened instantly) and actiually it is worth losing sleep over and phoning the bank if £18,000 suddenly goes inexplicably missing for two days, with no explanation that the first part of the transfer happens instantly but the second part is put in a queue to be handled manually.

There's no point getting all worked up about a couple of days, the HMRC rules state that cash ISA transfers should be completed within 15 working days, i.e. three weeks! As above, you won't lose interest, best not to lose any sleep over it either....

osiangwynedd

Thank you, but this is an internal transfer between accounts of the same customer not from one provider to another. It may or may not be different, I don't know, but I know now that next time a large amount of money seemingly goes missing from one of my accounts after an online transaction then I should wait for 3 weeks before questioning it. Good advice.

Archi_Bald

Calm down. You won't be losing any interest (or other money).