Refund to a closed bank account?

Berkshire_2

Hopefully this is the right place for this post! Long story short, I put a deposit on a car nearly 2 years ago. I've now cancelled that deposit, but the card and the account attached to that card are no longer open. I switched to a different bank.

The car company is saying that they can *only* refund to that card, and then leave it to the bank to sort out the mess, they claim that the FCA guidelines state this, and they aren't allowed to do anything else.

My bank has said they have never heard of this, as a refund to an account that's closed will typically be bounced back, but they also think that it might sit in some banking wilderness and I have to help them look for it. Either way, they were all very confused by this position from the car company.

Does anybody know about the FCA guidelines? Has anybody ever had this experience before?

p00hsticks

I'm not sure about the FCA, but it's usually the policy of the card companies (Visa, Mastercard etc) y that refunds should be processed back to the card that was originally used to make the payment. But after two years, I don't think this will actually be linked to the original card transaction, and there must be cases like yours where the original card is no longer active.

I'm going to request that this be moved over to the Banking board, which gets more traffic, as I believe a simliar topic has come up there before. 

WillPS

If you used the CASS, the refund should land in whichever account you switched to I believe.

In theory the PAN (card number) stays assigned to the account indefinitely. Let the merchant attempt a refund this way, ask for some kind of authorisation/confirmation number, and if the refund doesn't make it to you then contact the bank you switched away from explaining what's happened.

Berkshire_2

Thanks both. I did use CASS, so hopefully it will follow. 

GibbsRule_No3.

ANZ recently tried to refund a COVID flight fare to my now old expired card and closed account.  They sent me a form to fill in, when the initial refund bounced back to them, asked for a second email be sent, so not the full card number was supplied in one email and then refunded to my new bank account.  Excellent result from ANZ. Like OP  I had done a CASS switch, so just expected payment to old bank account, not the old expired card that was held with them.

Berkshire_2

Just to finish this off and hopefully answer the question for somebody else. The refund did work it's way through to my new account without me having to do anything.