Halifax Help 2 Buy Isa - Money transfer gone wrong

mbrown965

Today I opened a Help to Buy ISA with Halifax online, and at the end of the process, opted to transfer £1200 from my Santander account.

This is where everything went tits up. The transaction failed, but after logging in to my Santander account, I noticed that the 1200 is missing from my account (or rather, it is unavailable to me).

Santander say they have authorised the transaction and can only cancel it if Halifax send them a fax saying it is OK to do so.

Halifax say it is "physically impossible" for them to send a fax to Santander, and that Santander are in breach of PFR regulations for requesting a customer to ask another bank to do so.

Santander say they are not in breach of any regulations, and insist they have not made an error. Halifax say they have no record of any transaction and so there is nothing they can do.

Santander say the transaction will cancel automatically if Halifax do not request the money within 5 working days.

So I've spent an hour and a half on the phone relaying what each bank has said to the other, and at the end of it I've made no progress, plus I'm out the cost of the phone calls and the interest the money would earn for a week.

In fairness to Halifax, when I registered a complaint they offered to refund me the cost of the phone call to them - but then immediately asked if I gave permission to close the complaint, which felt like bribery!

Santander wanted nothing to do with it, offered no compensation, and insisted that the complaint was pointless.

Feel like a right mug and tempted to tell both banks to stick it!

Candyapple

When you say the transaction failed, what happened - did your session time out? Enter your password incorrectly?

jonesMUFCforever

Could it have failed because the limit seems to be £1000 lump sum and £200 by standing order?

mbrown965

The authorisation webpage loaded, and asked me to verifyy my Santander account details. I typed in the letters from my Santander password, it processed that, and then I got a very basic message on the Halifax website telling me the transaction failed.

grumbler

What sort of transaction was it? It's neither a card payment, nor a normal bank transfer.

For usual bank transfers Halifax is right: it's Santander that is supposed to either trace the payment or to help you with recovering it: What to do if you send money to wrong bank account

jonesMUFCforever

I will repeat myself - if the most you can put in the account as a lump sum is £1000 then anything over that would be rejected by Halifax and returned.

SeduLOUs

I've opened an account with Halifax today too. On the page where you can make a deposit with a debit card it states clear as day that the maximum you are allowed to deposit is £1000.

You can send another £200 this month, but that needs to be by standing order.

mbrown965

It was a card payment using the long 16 digit number.

If only the people working from Halifax had figured out the problem was the £1000 limit. Multiple conversations about the £1200 transfer with different Halifax staff and none of them mentioned it.

Still, it should have rejected the attempt cleanly, rather than requesting authorisation, and then pooing its pants, leaving the money unavailable for 5 days.

Halifax had no record of the transaction ever existing!

TheNewGuy_2

I am sure it'll sort itself out in a few days. No point stressing out, unless you really need the money, until it's been a week.

SeduLOUs

mbrown965 wrote: »

Still, it should have rejected the attempt cleanly, rather than requesting authorisation, and then pooing its pants, leaving the money unavailable for 5 days.

You're right it should. I can only imagine that trying to deposit >£1000 is the cause of your issue (perhaps not!), but that figure should have been immediately rejected anyway.

I wasn't sure about the whole debit card thing anyway and phoned them to check I could deposit by faster payment which I then did just before setting up my standing order to go out tomorrow. All seems OK so far on my end.

Anyway, it will either end up in the Halifax or be returned as available to Santander in a few days. You have up to 21 days to redeposit it to the Halifax if necessary, and I suspect you don't desperately need the cash if you were putting it in a H2B ISA...

Futuristic

Sounds like there is a £1200 authorisation on the card, the actual charge probably failed due to being over the £1000 limit hence why you have to wait 5 days for it to cancel the authorisation..