Halifax AML questions 13 January at 1:04PM in Budgeting & bank accounts 5 replies 285 views

alibean121

I opened a Halifax Rewards account in November for a switch bonus and have been only lightly using the account since then to trigger the reward. Have 2 other Reward accounts opened this month also very light usage for the Reward.

Yesterday I decided to open a Chip savings account and, as they do debit card pay-in, thought I might as well link a Halifax account as an option for triggering the reward in future. All fine, move some money in to trigger a bonus from Chip then today want to move most of the money into my Barclays Rainy Day for better interest. You can only withdraw back to the linked current account.

Add the Barclays account as a new payee and am not shocked to get a fraud check on the transaction. Ring them up. What I am surprised about is the questioning then was what I recognise more as AML questions on the source of funds etc. rather than the ‘did someone tell you to do this’ type stuff I was expecting. He went off and left me on hold for a long long time then did approve the transaction. The total amounts involved are around the level of my monthly salary and the blocked transaction was about £1600 - it’s not stupid money that you wouldn’t expect someone on my wages to have.

I’m now a bit worried they’re going to close my account - I know they can just decide they don’t want you as a Lloyds group customer. I’m thinking I should change my linked account so these transactions don’t go through this account - my main current account has huge volumes of transfers between my accounts and seems to recognise this as normal behaviour for me without issue. I’ve not been messing with bank offers for a number of years while I was seriously house hunting and waiting for my mortgage to complete so this has freaked me out a bit.

Any advice or perspectives appreciated.

Olinda99

Well one thing I would do is to have a 'main' current account (however you define that - maybe salary in, bills out, spending etc) and keep that completely clean and away from your 'huge volumes of transfers'

Choose a completely different bank to do your transfers etc because although you may see this as normal there is nothing normal about it - 99% of the population just do not do this.

redux

Olinda99 said:

Well one thing I would do is to have a 'main' current account (however you define that - maybe salary in, bills out, spending etc) and keep that completely clean and away from your 'huge volumes of transfers'

Choose a completely different bank to do your transfers etc because although you may see this as normal there is nothing normal about it - 99% of the population just do not do this.

Going by my reading of it, I suspect fewer than 99% will understand it 

Bridlington1

alibean121 said:

I opened a Halifax Rewards account in November for a switch bonus and have been only lightly using the account since then to trigger the reward. Have 2 other Reward accounts opened this month also very light usage for the Reward.

Yesterday I decided to open a Chip savings account and, as they do debit card pay-in, thought I might as well link a Halifax account as an option for triggering the reward in future. All fine, move some money in to trigger a bonus from Chip then today want to move most of the money into my Barclays Rainy Day for better interest. You can only withdraw back to the linked current account.

Add the Barclays account as a new payee and am not shocked to get a fraud check on the transaction. Ring them up. What I am surprised about is the questioning then was what I recognise more as AML questions on the source of funds etc. rather than the ‘did someone tell you to do this’ type stuff I was expecting. He went off and left me on hold for a long long time then did approve the transaction. The total amounts involved are around the level of my monthly salary and the blocked transaction was about £1600 - it’s not stupid money that you wouldn’t expect someone on my wages to have.

I’m now a bit worried they’re going to close my account - I know they can just decide they don’t want you as a Lloyds group customer. I’m thinking I should change my linked account so these transactions don’t go through this account - my main current account has huge volumes of transfers between my accounts and seems to recognise this as normal behaviour for me without issue. I’ve not been messing with bank offers for a number of years while I was seriously house hunting and waiting for my mortgage to complete so this has freaked me out a bit.

Any advice or perspectives appreciated.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. I doubt they will close your account just because of a single payment getting flagged by the fraud team, indeed I've had payments flagged by fraud teams in the past and the worst that's happened is I've had my current account frozen. Last spring Halifax blocked a payment of about £10k to another of my accounts, which resulted in me having to ring them. After I had explained the situation they got the payment released and I've not had a payment with them blocked since. If the bank shut your account just because of a single payment getting flagged they'd all soon run out of customers.

Payments get flagged up largely due to computer algorithms all the time and once the bank is satisfied that the payment isn't going to a scammer/funds are from a legitimate source etc you're usually good to go after that. AML questions will naturally keep changing over time largely due to fraudsters learning how to answer them in such a way that they can fool the banks into making fraudulent transactions and also new types of scams emerging.

As for having a main current account, I personally don't really have one as such. If you define a current account to be one which my wages go into it's Santander, if it's the one with the most money going through it it's Lloyds, if it's the one I've had the longest it's Halifax, if it's the one with the most debit card payments it's Natwest or RBS. I've over 20 current accounts in total, whose use varies depending on who's offering the best incentives at the time and rarely run into issues. Having large volumes of transactions won't in itself cause issues, indeed one of mine had over 17 times my annual income bouncing through it last year without a single payment getting flagged. The only time this would cause issues however is if you have an account that you rarely use, which you suddenly start sending large sums of money through, in which case this will likely raise eyebrows. 

I think it's probably wise to not use just one account as a nominated account for everything though, link them up to a few different accounts across different banks just in case one account gets frozen or even just suffers technical issues for whatever reason. If the account allows I'd set up more than one nominated account for it.

ForumUser7

Bridlington1 said:

I think it's probably wise to not use just one account as a nominated account for everything though, link them up to a few different accounts across different banks just in case one account gets frozen or even just suffers technical issues for whatever reason. If the account allows I'd set up more than one nominated account for it.

That's a really good idea - I recently made all my nominated accounts VM, as they offer interest for days it is in the account, but they are so unreliable I should probably change it...

Bridlington1

ForumUser7 said:

Bridlington1 said:

I think it's probably wise to not use just one account as a nominated account for everything though, link them up to a few different accounts across different banks just in case one account gets frozen or even just suffers technical issues for whatever reason. If the account allows I'd set up more than one nominated account for it.

That's a really good idea - I recently made all my nominated accounts VM, as they offer interest for days it is in the account, but they are so unreliable I should probably change it...

For simplicity's sake I'd probably just link any accounts you open in the future to accounts other than Virgin for a while and/or just add additional nominated bank accounts as a backup (YBS, NS&I, Leeds BS etc are good in this respect). A lot of accounts i.e. Monmouthshire BS, Scottish Widows etc want proof of your nominated account so it would involve a lot of faffing about trying to change them.

When setting up nominated accounts I usually just alternate between Lloyds, Virgin, Nationwide,  sometimes Halifax and occasionally throw some of the others in for the odd regular saver here and there. Seems to have worked well so far. You will probably end up with things naturally balancing themselves out after a few months anyway without having to go round changing your nominated accounts.