PO Bank / Bank Of Ireland ISAs: money gone missing

glider3560

eskbanker said:

norfolk_wb said:

Well, quite, why mention that, as it also has no bearing on the opening or operation of a Post Office Money account?

Unfortunately it does. The money gets taken in as a payment through the Horizon system, for which you then get a receipt.
Horizon however has notorious communication issues, especially if network access is ever less than perfect - which it is going to be in a rural PO. It seems that Horizon and BOI's particular Worldpay instance - in the words of the BOI rep - "don't always play nice", and transactions can be lost or delayed despite being acknowledged in Horizon.

Sure, I'm not saying that Horizon doesn't have its well-publicised flaws, but just making the point that transactions to BOI are no more or no less likely to be impacted as those to other banks, or utility company bills, or TV licences, or whatever, i.e. PO Money is no more connected to PO Counters than any other payment recipient is.

When you open a new savings account in branch, the payment is not processed against a specific account.  The PO copy of the receipt is attached to the application form and posted somewhere for manual processing.  The receipt is then used to manually credit the newly set up account.  There is a lot of scope for paper to go missing, or be mislaid.

Compare this to cash deposits for other banks, or for bill payments, where the customer account details are captured at the time of the transaction.  Even if the transaction isn't processed in real-time (e.g. due to a communications failure), the account data is still there on the terminal for processing at a later point.

Thrugelmir

My partner went in branch to renew an ISA with Metro Bank onto a new fixed rate. A couple of weeks later received a letter to say had defaulted onto low variable rate. Another visit to the branch to rectify. The original paperwork sitting internally somewhere unactioned apparently. This is the norm currently. One just has to adjust to it. 

norfolk_wb

glider3560 said:

You have to go through the provider's complaints process before the Financial Ombudsman will look at your case.  It sounds like you haven't actually made a complaint yet, rather just made some enquiries.  I'd suggest making a complaint asap, to get the 8 week time limit started.

It's probably a case of the form sitting somewhere, and it just hasn't been processed yet.

Thanks. I did try starting a complaint with the Post Office, and got a message back saying they weren't responsible for lost mail, and did I know the Royal Mail were a separate company?
(Hint: if anyone from Post Office is reading this, TURN OFF THE DAMN AUTO REPLY SCRIPTS - or make it clear it's an auto reply and don't put some poor person's name at the end of it to make it feel personalised)

glider3560

norfolk_wb said:

glider3560 said:

You have to go through the provider's complaints process before the Financial Ombudsman will look at your case.  It sounds like you haven't actually made a complaint yet, rather just made some enquiries.  I'd suggest making a complaint asap, to get the 8 week time limit started.

It's probably a case of the form sitting somewhere, and it just hasn't been processed yet.

Thanks. I did try starting a complaint with the Post Office, and got a message back saying they weren't responsible for lost mail, and did I know the Royal Mail were a separate company?
(Hint: if anyone from Post Office is reading this, TURN OFF THE DAMN AUTO REPLY SCRIPTS - or make it clear it's an auto reply and don't put some poor person's name at the end of it to make it feel personalised)

How they move the form between offices is their problem, not yours.

You should make a formal complaint in writing (their ISAs are actually provided by an intermediary, details in https://www.postoffice.co.uk/dam/jcr:4dbff233-4640-48d1-8234-24e8a2ba358a/kip-eacisa-2020.pdf).  This gives them 8 weeks to give a proper written response (they'll actually look into your complaint, rather than a call centre operative try to get rid of you).  Once you've got that, you can go to the Financial Ombudsman Service if you aren't happy with the response.

eskbanker

norfolk_wb said:

glider3560 said:

You have to go through the provider's complaints process before the Financial Ombudsman will look at your case.  It sounds like you haven't actually made a complaint yet, rather just made some enquiries.  I'd suggest making a complaint asap, to get the 8 week time limit started.

It's probably a case of the form sitting somewhere, and it just hasn't been processed yet.

Thanks. I did try starting a complaint with the Post Office, and got a message back saying they weren't responsible for lost mail, and did I know the Royal Mail were a separate company?
(Hint: if anyone from Post Office is reading this, TURN OFF THE DAMN AUTO REPLY SCRIPTS - or make it clear it's an auto reply and don't put some poor person's name at the end of it to make it feel personalised)

While they're of course right that Royal Mail is a different company (just like NS&I and BOI as above), that doesn't let PO off the hook if they've accepted a payment from you but have failed to get it to the company they're acting as a agent for!  If they choose to use insufficiently robust and reliable channels to process such applications, that's their problem, not the customer's....