Joint Account For Power Of Attorney?

Carlisle1967

Hi all.

If 2 people are joint power of attorneys for an elderly father is there a way for them both to have equal access to the account?

Currently it is set up on a mobile app / online however if the person who did not first sign up to the account and wants access then they must enter the OTP that is sent to the primary phone number.

eskbanker

It'll depend on which bank it is and what facilities they're prepared to offer, have you asked them?

blue.peter

Carlisle1967 said:

Hi all.

If 2 people are joint power of attorneys for an elderly father is there a way for them both to have equal access to the account?

Currently it is set up on a mobile app / online however if the person who did not first sign up to the account and wants access then they must enter the OTP that is sent to the primary phone number.

IME, banks - well, certainly Lloyds Banking Group - won't allow attorneys who have to act jointly any online or mobile account access. Their argument is that only one person is accessing the account and giving instructions (e.g., to make a payment), and this is not in accordance with the authority granted to them.

This is, of course, completely bonkers: they must, I think, have some way of handling joint instructions online for e.g. businesses. However, they certainly won't do it for personal accounts.

If you've got any access, however, inconvenient it is, my advice would be not to rock the boat. You risk having the existing access withdrawn.

(My sister and I are joint attorneys for our mother. LBG won't allow us any online access to either of her current accounts. They're with Lloyds and Halifax. We have to do everything offline, and they make life very difficult for us. They bounce cheques for no reason, fight over standing orders - signed by both of us - sent in by post and so on. And don't try to get any sense out of LBG's Powers of Attorney team. You won't achieve anything. They insisted that we had to attend interview together just to register the PofA, and didn't care that we live a hundred miles apart. Fortunately, I managed to find someone with a bit of common sense at the local Halifax branch.)

jbuchanangb

In the case where two people are appointed "jointly", as opposed to "jointly & severally", then every activity has to be done together and with both signatures. My sister was living in Africa when our father instructed his solicitor to appoint us "jointly". When he lost mental capacity and we had to act for him she came back from Africa and we worked together. We could cash cheques by going to the bank together and signing the cheque in front of the cashier. No telephone or online banking was allowed. No debit card could be issued. That was about it. When he went into a care home we both signed a standing order instruction to pay the fees. After we sold his house, with both signatures on everything, and the proceeds needed to be invested, we had to attend the bank together and put both our signatures on all the documents. The donor chooses to appoint his/her attorneys jointly to avoid the sort of scandal which you occasionally hear about when an attorney acting alone, even having been one of two appointed jointly and severally abuses their authority and cleans out the donor's accounts etc. The banks are quite right to abide by the donor's decision and to prevent any one of the attorneys acting alone.

Zanderman

Completely depends on which bank and whether attorneys have to act jointly. 

My experience, when I was one of 3 attorneys who could act jointly or severally, was that we kept life simple and used just one of us for online access at both NatWest and at Lloyds. For Lloyds we all had debit cards and that was all that was needed, with just one of us monitoring things online. That was before OTPs for online debit card purchases though!

In the OP's case do both attorneys really need online access? 

And is making an account 'joint' the right thing to do anyway? The Attorneys would, normally, be using the donor's existing accounts, as best they can, as allowed by the banks. Talk of a joint account suggests changing an account's status in a different way entirely. If doing that then why not go the whole hog and just open a (new) joint account, though that too may have issues - whose names would it be in? - it would have to include the donor. 

FarmGirl78

Totally separate to Power of Attorney is something called "Third Party Authority". My Mum had third party authority to my Nan's bank account, which from memory was with Barclays. Nan had to approve everything and agree in advance exactly what Mum couldn't or couldn't have access to, or ability to do. Mum got her own bank card with "TPA" printed after her name, with a separate card number to my Nan. Very similar to a joint account, but it wasn't.

While she did have Power of Attorney this was totally separate from it. I think Barclays also offered to have someone come to the house to set up security etc but this was about 4 years ago and the local branch has shut so I couldn't say if they'd still do this.

Hope this helps x