sending money to icorrect payee

Yorkshirerover

Hi fwor....the payee was completely new to me no prior details involved.....Ive set up enough payee accounts to know the details  and how to do it ......I keep saying only the Nationwide knew of the incorrect payee details....which I believe came from the process of validating the details I inputted

fwor

That's what I was trying to explain. The sort code for the new details was completely different, so they simply could not have sent it to HSBC to validate it. You say that Nationwide "changed the details to suit" but there is absolutely no reason why they should even have known about the existence of the HSBC account, let alone have changed the detail.

I suspect that you simply aren't remembering the steps that you went through accurately. That's not a criticism - I logged onto my own bank current account earlier this afternoon and I can't remember the details of what I did, no more than 2 hours later...

AmityNeon

Yorkshirerover said:

Hi fwor....the payee was completely new to me no prior details involved.....Ive set up enough payee accounts to know the details  and how to do it ......I keep saying only the Nationwide knew of the incorrect payee details....which I believe came from the process of validating the details I inputted

Nationwide doesn't have access to a national database of every valid bank account; it's technically impossible for them to choose a different set of account details that happen to coincidentally match the name of your payee and be a branch local to you. Computer programs can be badly written, but bugs are neither magic nor a convenient excuse allowing the inexplicable.

Yorkshirerover said:

The original instructions were checked and found to be correct...you cannot get 16 digits wrong and then find out it refers to a local bank

You're introducing new information again, which is inconsistent or incorrect. Your prose is highly lackadaisical, you avoid answering specific questions, and it doesn't help that your recaps are tainted with foregone conclusions so the facts are extremely difficult to establish.

Be thankful Nationwide is reimbursing your user error.

enthusiasticsaver

Have you paid this person previously?

Nationwide uses COPS and as others have said normally the only option is match, partial match or not found.  If you put in the correct account details and COPS came back with a match I am not sure how it could have gone to some random account with another bank entirely.  Banks do not keep account numbers of accounts held with other institutions. 

You are right of course in that you should always double check payee details before finally sending money.  

dealyboy

Hi AmityNeon ...

AmityNeon said:

Yorkshirerover said:

Hi fwor....the payee was completely new to me no prior details involved.....Ive set up enough payee accounts to know the details  and how to do it ......I keep saying only the Nationwide knew of the incorrect payee details....which I believe came from the process of validating the details I inputted

Nationwide doesn't have access to a national database of every valid bank account; it's technically impossible for them to choose a different set of account details that happen to coincidentally match the name of your payee and be a branch local to you. Computer programmes can be badly written, but bugs are neither magic nor a convenient excuse allowing the inexplicable.

Yorkshirerover said:

The original instructions were checked and found to be correct...you cannot get 16 digits wrong and then find out it refers to a local bank

You're introducing new information again, which is inconsistent or incorrect. Your prose is highly lackadaisical, you avoid answering specific questions, and it doesn't help that your recaps are tainted with foregone conclusions so the facts are extremely difficult to establish.

Be thankful Nationwide is reimbursing your user error.

We all like a puzzle, hence 5 pages of dialogue, but its like doing a jigsaw with two pieces missing and two pieces from another puzzle.

Am I misunderstanding something, but a bank account is not local, its not been that way for decades. HSBC are a national and international bank accessible from anywhere geographically, branches are merely business units and do not hold accounts. Bank accounts are 14 digits, 6 digits sort code and 8 digits account number.

I am with Nationwide BS and have had an HSBC account, I also was a software engineer for many years and worked on Barclays Integrated Network System, so I have some systems knowledge, but here it's also a question of logic to which the OP will have had lots of experience.

We have the Nationwide BS, the payee's old bank HSBC, the payee's correct bank NatWest, the payer (OP) and the payee. We are told the payer set up a new payment (single or regular) on a Nationwide application (either app or internet banking) using the payee's details from an e-mail, this would have been checked for name/account details. Was the OP asked to confirm anything? We also know that computer systems can have defects (I have uncovered a few), humans can make mistakes and data can be transposed.

In this case we are not accusing anyone or anything, certainly not the OP but also not the Nationwide BS, we are looking for the most likely cause. The payee's bank details provided in an e-mail were entered into the payment setup of NW's system and payment was made but didn't arrive and on checking the payment setup the bank details were found to be different. I presume the OP had not made any arrangements with the other party before and so didn't have any duplicate names (it is possible to set up different payments to different banks/accounts under the same selectable names), I have four duplicates. The OP is insistent that the bank details changed to the payee's old bank account details which were unknown to both the OP and the payee at the time.

Fraud does happen, human intervention can divert funds, but this is highly unlikely to be to a different bank and an inaccessible account. Only HSBC and the payee would have access to it.

Is it possible the payee has inadvertently provided incorrect details, yes it is. Numbers are numbers and these days people have multiple accounts, it is very easy to remember or find the wrong details and put them in an e-mail, but that would not explain how those could change once setup, or could it? Banking systems are sophisticated in two very important respects: anti-fraud and account transference. In the case of the latter, payments addressed to a redundant account are intercepted and directed to an active linked account, the payer is informed of the new account, systems or people can then confirm the new account.

AmityNeon

dealyboy said:

Numbers are numbers and these days people have multiple accounts, it is very easy to remember or find the wrong details and put them in an e-mail, but that would not explain how those could change once setup, or could it? Banking systems are sophisticated in two very important respects: anti-fraud and account transference. In the case of the latter, payments addressed to a redundant account are intercepted and directed to an active linked account, the payer is informed of the new account, systems or people can then confirm the new account.

This behaviour, where payee details were allegedly changed by the system without confirmation, could not be reproduced when the payee was created the second time (apparently using the exact same details).

In my experience, implausible 'bugs' bordering the fantastical in effect are the realm of user error, and realistic bugs are technically reproducible. Even glitches have explanations, and no glitch could explain this. I have years of experience debugging applications, as well as in IT support dealing with countless stories of human error; one is beautifully logical in its specificity, and the other is a nightmare of generalisations plagued by the foibles of human psychology and social conditioning.

eskbanker

Yorkshirerover said:

A badly written programme can be biased to the payees name and treat the sort and account details as secondary

To a certain extent I can understand why you might cling to this but it really isn't a credible explanation in terms of how the CoP process actually works, which, as already covered, is unequivocally validating a name based on the supplied numbers, not providing different numbers that happen to match the name!  It's not something that can arise from badly written programs, this is all based on highly standardised industry-wide APIs that simply don't return account numbers to the requesting institution - if it was feasible for CoP to overwrite such details in the way you appear to believe then the entire system would be in chaotic meltdown....

[Deleted User]

A typical case for the application of Occam’s Razor.

Section62

fwor said:

That's what I was trying to explain. The sort code for the new details was completely different, so they simply could not have sent it to HSBC to validate it. You say that Nationwide "changed the details to suit" but there is absolutely no reason why they should even have known about the existence of the HSBC account, let alone have changed the detail.

I suspect that you simply aren't remembering the steps that you went through accurately. That's not a criticism - I logged onto my own bank current account earlier this afternoon and I can't remember the details of what I did, no more than 2 hours later...

penners324 said:

As said earlier, I suggest you find the email you used to set up the payee.

What your claiming is utterly impossible 

I disagree.

The reason why is I have a currently live complaint with bank 'B' who act as the handler of payments on behalf of bank 'C', with whom I have an account.

I had a payee set up with (as it happens) Nationwide to send money to my account with bank 'C'.

I made a payment from my Nationwide account to my account at bank 'C'.  A week later I received an unidentified payment into my Nationwide account. I queried the payment with Nationwide who said they couldn't give me the source account details for data protection reasons, but could confirm that it was an account belonging to bank 'B'.  Bank 'B' denied the payment had anything to do with them.  They also used the word 'impossible'. Several times.

After a lot more effort and help from Nationwide, I was able to discover that the saved payee details for my account with bank 'C' were incorrect.

'Occam’s Razor' might suggest the fault was mine and it was me that had got the payee details wrong.  That was the view bank 'B' took, and still do.

However, it transpired that bank 'B' had sent Nationwide a "system feed request" asking them to amend the details Nationwide held for my bank 'C' account. Neither bank 'B' or Nationwide told me about this.  Other information also suggests I wasn't unique in this alteration being made.

So I had unwittingly made a payment to an incorrect account, not because of an error on my part, but because of a "system feed request" error by a bank.

From what the OP says I think there is a fundamental difference between their case and mine, in that it sounds like they made a payment contemporaneously with creating the payee, whereas my payee had been set up for a long time before.  However - and without knowing the detail of how the process works (something I apparently share with bank 'B') - it seems plausible that a similar "system feed request" instruction could be applied in real time to amend the payee details between them being entered by the customer, and the payment being sent to the destination account.

Thus Nationwide could know about the HSBC account, and could have changed the payee details (automatically) beliving that to be the correct destination.

I'm not saying the OP's situation is the same as mine.  But I would suggest folks hold off using words like 'impossible' until the OP has been able to get to the bottom of this... especially if (like bank 'B') the people commenting don't actually know what is 'impossible' or not.

OP, keep pressing Nationwide for answers.  When "Nationwide said this was impossible as their system could not change payee details" they were wrong. Eventually you'll get to someone with the knowledge and authority to ask the people who do know how their systems work, and hopefully they will be able to figure out exactly what happened.

k_man

Yorkshirerover said:

The question to ask is surely how did Nationwide get the details to pay into the wrong account ??...Not from me...when I set the correct payee  again I checked the detail before sending payment which I will do now every time
The original instructions were checked and found to be correct...you cannot get 16 digits wrong and then find out it refers to a local bank 
No phone nos involved
A badly written programme can be biased to the payees name and treat the sort and account details as secondary

After the payment had been reported as not having arrived....I found out that the sort code belonged to a local bank...after telling my payee this info she confirmed they did once bank with the HSBC...but as it was a long time ago she didnt have the acc no

The only possible way this acc detail was produced is from the Nationwide....remember the payees name was always correct even though the sort and acc nos were not

Just for some clarity, as this complex...
Did you mean 16 digits? Or 14 (6 for sort and 8 for account)?

16 is the number of digits for a Debit or credit card.

How close/similar were the correct, and incorret details?

Finally, was the Payee name a person's name, or a business?