Monzo have taken my money following advice from HSBC

Band7

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

Banks aren't arbiters. If you don't agree to return the money, your bank will give your details to the sender so that they could try to recover it by other means, e.d. Small Claims Court.

Only if they're prepared to breach the Data Protection Act (so they won't do this)!

Well, how wrong I was believing that this nonsense changed at last when new safeguards were introduced!

grumbler said:

Some time ago it was impossible to check whether some bank account belonged to some particular person - allegedly because of the same stupid DPA. Now it's easy to do. Was the DPA changed accordingly?

Assuming you're referring to Confirmation of Payee, this protocol was presumably implemented within the bounds of what DPA, sorry, the 'stupid DPA', permits, as it was never likely that the data protection legislation would be amended specifically for this purpose!  CoP obviously falls some way short of full disclosure of the payee's details, even though it does confirm a partial or full match with the name of the account holder....

Just imagine (in pre CoP times) coming to a branch (or using telephone) and asking politely "Can you tell me, please, whether your account xx-xx-xx yyyyyyyy belongs to Mr J.Smith? The answer would be something like "DPA.... DPA.... DPA .... DPA........"

You would still not get a yes or no answer to that question now - although you'd get some thing a lot more intelligent than the repeated uttering of an abbreviation. Unless you want to make a payment to a person, you have no right to know who a given account belongs to, without the account holder agreeing that you should know. Not that it's a question too many people would be asking in the first instance unless they need to make a payment to the account holder.

grumbler

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

Banks aren't arbiters. If you don't agree to return the money, your bank will give your details to the sender so that they could try to recover it by other means, e.d. Small Claims Court.

Only if they're prepared to breach the Data Protection Act (so they won't do this)!

Well, how wrong I was believing that this nonsense changed at last when new safeguards were introduced!

grumbler said:

Some time ago it was impossible to check whether some bank account belonged to some particular person - allegedly because of the same stupid DPA. Now it's easy to do. Was the DPA changed accordingly?

Assuming you're referring to Confirmation of Payee, this protocol was presumably implemented within the bounds of what DPA, sorry, the 'stupid DPA', permits, as it was never likely that the data protection legislation would be amended specifically for this purpose!  CoP obviously falls some way short of full disclosure of the payee's details, even though it does confirm a partial or full match with the name of the account holder....

Just imagine coming to a branch (or using telephone) and asking politely "Can you tell me, please, whether your account xx-xx-xx yyyyyyyy belongs to Mr J.Smith? The answer would be something like "DPA.... DPA.... DPA .... DPA........"

Your point being....?

My point being that something that was impossible allegedly because of DPA suddenly became possible without any amendments to DPA.

eskbanker

grumbler said:

My point being that something that was impossible allegedly because of DPA suddenly became possible without any amendments to DPA.

I don't see any inconsistency here myself - it seems perfectly reasonable to me for a bank to have a policy of instructing and training staff not to divulge personal details of others in conversations with customers, while also participating in an industry-wide initiative (that will presumably have been carefully reviewed by legal and compliance teams) that entails auditable validation of limited personal data in certain controlled circumstances.

grumbler

Band7 said:

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

Banks aren't arbiters. If you don't agree to return the money, your bank will give your details to the sender so that they could try to recover it by other means, e.d. Small Claims Court.

Only if they're prepared to breach the Data Protection Act (so they won't do this)!

Well, how wrong I was believing that this nonsense changed at last when new safeguards were introduced!

grumbler said:

Some time ago it was impossible to check whether some bank account belonged to some particular person - allegedly because of the same stupid DPA. Now it's easy to do. Was the DPA changed accordingly?

Assuming you're referring to Confirmation of Payee, this protocol was presumably implemented within the bounds of what DPA, sorry, the 'stupid DPA', permits, as it was never likely that the data protection legislation would be amended specifically for this purpose!  CoP obviously falls some way short of full disclosure of the payee's details, even though it does confirm a partial or full match with the name of the account holder....

Just imagine (in pre CoP times) coming to a branch (or using telephone) and asking politely "Can you tell me, please, whether your account xx-xx-xx yyyyyyyy belongs to Mr J.Smith? The answer would be something like "DPA.... DPA.... DPA .... DPA........"

You would still not get a yes or no answer to that question now

You will get even more than yes/no

This account is registered to John Smith

- Barclays. And what I entered was just J Smith.

grumbler

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

My point being that something that was impossible allegedly because of DPA suddenly became possible without any amendments to DPA.

I don't see any inconsistency here myself - it seems perfectly reasonable to me for a bank to have a policy of instructing and training staff not to divulge personal details of others in conversations with customers, while also participating in an industry-wide initiative (that will presumably have been carefully reviewed by legal and compliance teams) that entails auditable validation of limited personal data in certain controlled circumstances.

I can assure you that what you'd hear from the frontline CS would be DP ACT , not policy.

eskbanker

grumbler said:

eskbanker said:

grumbler said:

My point being that something that was impossible allegedly because of DPA suddenly became possible without any amendments to DPA.

I don't see any inconsistency here myself - it seems perfectly reasonable to me for a bank to have a policy of instructing and training staff not to divulge personal details of others in conversations with customers, while also participating in an industry-wide initiative (that will presumably have been carefully reviewed by legal and compliance teams) that entails auditable validation of limited personal data in certain controlled circumstances.

I can assure you that what you'd hear from the frontline CS would be DP ACT , not policy.

And?

It'll be a policy designed with DPA compliance in mind, but expecting frontline customer-facing staff to be experts on the rationale behind all of their work instructions is optimistic....

Anyway, this is all getting further away from OP's concern about reversal (or not) of a transfer, so would suggest that if you want to keep digging further into data protection principles then doing so in another thread would probably be polite!