Making Large Payments

ThemeOne

I needed to transfer a large amount of money recently - nearly £50K. TSB told me it would be a CHAPS payment which would cost £30 and could only be done in branch - I agreed because it was time sensitive and didn't want to waste time arguing.

What annoyed me was it ended up being slower than an online payment - nearly 2 hours as opposed to almost instant online - I'd have been happy to do an online payment, but TSB's limit is £25K.

So my question is, did it *have* to be a CHAPS payment? I remember having to do a few largish payments with Co-op Bank, and it was all done on the phone as a normal payment with no fee.

eskbanker

CHAPS is a same-day service not an instant one, and Faster Payments is actually a next business day service, although in practice it's often quicker, especially for small payments - anecdotally, larger ones are more likely to be held up for security checks.

So, even if TSB's FP limit was higher than £25K, there would have been no guarantee that it would have gone through quickly as you'd expected.

Was there anything stopping you splitting it into two transactions below the £25K limit?

ThemeOne

eskbanker wrote: »

Was there anything stopping you splitting it into two transactions below the £25K limit?

What stopped me was TSB's rules over what counted as "a 24 hour period" over the weekend.

I won't go into details as my head hurts just thinking about it but in a nutshell you "lose" a 24 hour period (and hence the opportunity for making one £25K transfer) over the weekend. Had it not been for this I would have split it as you suggest.

Apologies if that makes no sense.

Ballard

The banks are at liberty to set their own limits for faster payments so if TSB have a £25k limit then that's what they have. Had you known the details of the payment in advance then you'd have been able to have circumvented the CHAPS route over two days as suggested.

As frustrating as this is for you, those are the rules so you have to swallow them.

ThemeOne

Ballard wrote: »

The banks are at liberty to set their own limits for faster payments so if TSB have a £25k limit then that's what they have. Had you known the details of the payment in advance then you'd have been able to have circumvented the CHAPS route over two days as suggested.

As frustrating as this is for you, those are the rules so you have to swallow them.

Indeed - provided the two days concerned are not over a weekend, when two days apparently become one and Sunday lasts for most of Monday too!

Anyway thank you all for your insights. There is probably little more to be said here, the frustrations of doing the transfer led me to wonder if all banks do these things the same (it seems not), and a quest on my part to find out more about the banking systems which underlie the process.

It was interesting to discover the difference between CHAPS and faster payments.