Zopa Savings

Forestcoalpit

Zopa has recently come up as a recommended home for a fixed term bond.  But my own high street bank HSBC, adamantly refuse to send funds to them by Fast Payment.  On each occasion I have attempted to send funds HSBC have suspended all my accounts - resulting in a lost weekend of 7.5 hours “on hold” to their Fraud Dept (unsuccessful) and finally a round trip of twenty miles to my local branch (2.5 hours for the manager to get my accounts back on line).

Has anybody else suffered this?  Have HSBC the right to undermine Zopa’s business in this way?  

colsten

It's probably total co-incidence and you are most unlikely to be able to prove that HSBC are undermining Zopa's business.

It's clearly a nuisance if your account gets blocked when all you want to do is transfer money to one of your own accounts, and the time your account got blocked for sounds unreasonably long. If you haven't already done so, you might want to consider raising a formal complaint, with a view to get a formal apology and compensation for your time and the inconvenience caused. If I were you, I would not mention anything about undermining Zopa's business.

Forestcoalpit

Thank you - but not a c-incidence. HSBC were very specific about their risk assessment.

colsten

You will have huge difficulties proving that HSBC had any malicious intent, mostly because they didn't have any.

caveat_emptor

Zopa savings are covered by FSCS

Jetty_4

Now Sep 8th and my sister has just very easily opened an Zopa account and her HSBC bank, both head office and local have refused to transfer her money by faster payment to Zopa as not heard of them and wanted to charge her £17 and said it was best to not go through with the payment. I have come home and opened an account with Zopa with payment from my Santander account with no problem. HSBC are consistently not very helpful both over the phone and counter.

Jetty_4

Now Sep 8th and my sister has just very easily opened an Zopa account and her HSBC bank, both head office and local have refused to transfer her money by faster payment to Zopa as not heard of them and wanted to charge her £17 and said it was best to not go through with the payment. I have come home and opened an account with Zopa with payment from my Santander account with no problem. HSBC are consistently not very helpful both over the phone and counter.

eskbanker

Jetty_4 said:

Now Sep 8th and my sister has just very easily opened an Zopa account and her HSBC bank, both head office and local have refused to transfer her money by faster payment to Zopa as not heard of them and wanted to charge her £17 and said it was best to not go through with the payment.

Sounds like some crossed wires somewhere along the line - was she trying to send a payment in excess of her daily/transaction limit perhaps?  A £17 fee implies that they were proposing the use of CHAPS rather than faster payments, which is sometimes put forward as a way of circumventing such limits.

Or did she try online initially and fail the Confirmation of Payee check, which is purely advisory?

melbury

I am thinking of opening an account with Zopa as they are offering some good savings rates.

Does anyone know if the same problem is likely to occur with Lloyds Bank?

jamesd

Forestcoalpit said:

Has anybody else suffered this?  

They once tried to argue that my Zopa lending was a business activity and hence money to and from there was a misuse of my personal account for business purposes and hence they were closing the current account. 

Another time they agreed in advance to a series of transactions by phone and a week later asserted that I'd misused my account by carrying out those transactions so they were closing my current account and converting my offset mortgage to a normal one. It'd be nice if massive punitive action by them followed by complaints to get it reversed didn't happen. Presumably as punishment the second time they put in a block on future lending to me. In my case it was First Direct which uses the HSBC fraud team. At least having listened to the phone call they accepted that it wasn't reasonable to close an account and change a mortgage for comprehensively described transactions which the bank had agreed to in advance.

Of course they have previously encountered Zopa because they did so in their dealings with me around eight years ago.

The fraud team isn't all bad. They made changes to handle the things that prompted both of the issues I encountered, one changing the FD terms and conditions and the other getting a peer to peer business to change its terms by removing a discount price that favoured using more than one transaction to transfer money because it was cheaper that way.

I try to remember that HSBC has received large penalties for facilitating money laundering on several occasions and that a former head of their security team was charged with offences, details of which I forget. Costing them lots of money could undoubtedly explain then having very low willingness for investigating before shooting. But treating customers fairly it isn't.

Every transaction I did was entirely lawful, and confirmed by them to be both that an in accord with their terms and conditions.

After the second incident of trouble with entirely lawful transactions that other banks were content to handle I discussed with the fraud team how to operate my current account to reduce the chance of further negative interactions with them and how to avoid lawful transactions that they just didn't want to handle, since it had just been demonstrated that I couldn't even rely on explicit prior consent from the bank. While it was more restrictive than strictly necessary I abandoned my attempts to use it as my main account and stuck largely to automated payments like credits, debits and standing orders with occasional offset mortgage related transactions.

If you want to do anything that's not utterly routine for wage receiving employees with little money and investments then I suggest you do it with an account somewhere else. You simply can't know reliably in advance what they might dislike when it comes to investments or anything not utterly routine.

melbury said:

I am thinking of opening an account with Zopa as they are offering some good savings rates.

Does anyone know if the same problem is likely to occur with Lloyds Bank?

Not likely. Neither NatWest nor Santander have made any mention of issues with the same sort of transactions that FD/HSBC security disliked.

jamesd

Forestcoalpit said:

Thank you - but not a c-incidence. HSBC were very specific about their risk assessment.

The risk assessment bit might be partly explained by banks now being liable for customer losses to various types of payment fraud.

That's not a sufficient reason for them to be unaware of the longest running of the alternative investment and bank businesses and presumably wrongly conclude that it was a fraudulent transaction.

Regrettably a complaint seems like the way to go with this, in the hope that they might cease actions with the effect of stopping other new competitor banks from doing business with their customers.

Not Zopa but within the last few months I've sent money two other P2P firms from FD mortgage offset-related accounts and a VCT firm without any issues coming to my attention. All three were uncommon for me since I greatly limit investment-related use of the account. Still, if there hadn't been issues with transfer limits and time I'd have sent the money to another bank first instead of directly from FD.