What does your bank do in this situation

eskbanker

born_again said:

MoneySavingTart said:

First direct confirmed to me yesterday that they deleted after "a year or so"
told them that was a deal breaker.

Why is it a deal breaker, when you have not made any payments to that entity for over a year & their details may no longer be valid. It is the bank protecting you from making a payment to the wrong details.
It is only the same as a DD is invalid after 13 months of inactivity.

Any dormancy policy inevitably has to involve a timeout period, but I've always understood the DD one to be set at 13 months because that allows for annual DDs with a small contingency on top.  For customer-initiated ad hoc payees, I can't see any significance to setting a timeout period at 13 months - making a repeat payment to the wrong details could happen at any time, e.g. within 13 hours or 13 years of the previous payment, so I'd have thought that purging unused ones is simply routine administrative housekeeping for the bank's benefit rather than offering protection to customers as such, even if that's potentially a side-effect?

Section62

born_again said:

MoneySavingTart said:

First direct confirmed to me yesterday that they deleted after "a year or so"
told them that was a deal breaker.

Why is it a deal breaker, when you have not made any payments to that entity for over a year & their details may no longer be valid. It is the bank protecting you from making a payment to the wrong details.
It is only the same as a DD is invalid after 13 months of inactivity.

All of my Nationwide payees are to my own accounts at various banks and building societies, so the risk of me making a payment to an account which doesn't exist is very small.

The risk which does exist is making an error when setting a new payee up, and the possibility of entering the wrong details.  By deleting payees after 13 months Nationwide expose me to the risk that I pay money to the wrong account when having to set up the payee again.  I don't see their actions as any form of protection.

Besides, they have said the reason why they introduced the policy is due to a lack of space on their computer systems - nothing to do with protecting customers making individual payments.

I don't regard it as a 'deal breaker', but I have started the progress of migrating payments to a different account, and for me represents one more reason not to use Nationwide as much as I once did.

eskbanker

Section62 said:

The risk which does exist is making an error when setting a new payee up, and the possibility of entering the wrong details.  By deleting payees after 13 months Nationwide expose me to the risk that I pay money to the wrong account when having to set up the payee again.  I don't see their actions as any form of protection.

Recreating payees now does subject (most of) them to the Confirmation of Payee validation, which may not have been the case when they were originally created, so that mitigates the chances of errors when recreating.

born_again

Section62 said:

born_again said:

MoneySavingTart said:

First direct confirmed to me yesterday that they deleted after "a year or so"
told them that was a deal breaker.

Why is it a deal breaker, when you have not made any payments to that entity for over a year & their details may no longer be valid. It is the bank protecting you from making a payment to the wrong details.
It is only the same as a DD is invalid after 13 months of inactivity.

All of my Nationwide payees are to my own accounts at various banks and building societies, so the risk of me making a payment to an account which doesn't exist is very small.

The risk which does exist is making an error when setting a new payee up, and the possibility of entering the wrong details.  By deleting payees after 13 months Nationwide expose me to the risk that I pay money to the wrong account when having to set up the payee again.  I don't see their actions as any form of protection.

Besides, they have said the reason why they introduced the policy is due to a lack of space on their computer systems - nothing to do with protecting customers making individual payments.

I don't regard it as a 'deal breaker', but I have started the progress of migrating payments to a different account, and for me represents one more reason not to use Nationwide as much as I once did.

I was asking @Moneysavingtart 👍

MoneySavingTart

born_again said:

MoneySavingTart said:

First direct confirmed to me yesterday that they deleted after "a year or so"
told them that was a deal breaker.

Why is it a deal breaker, when you have not made any payments to that entity for over a year & their details may no longer be valid. It is the bank protecting you from making a payment to the wrong details.
It is only the same as a DD is invalid after 13 months of inactivity.

The deal breaker was with respect to the First Direct reply when I asked them if they deleted recipients. He said would you like to continue with opening an account. No I said your deletion policy is a deal breaker

I expect my bank to give me control over when payees get deleted
Possible other ways could be in order of decreasing acceptability.
1) We have introduced a new feature. you can download a text file of all your payees.
2) email me saying " we are considering deleting the following payees. If you dont respond in 30day we will go ahead"
3) email to say "we have had to delete the following payees, their details are in the list of recently cancelled payees and you can restore any you still need with a single mouse click..
Nationwide refused to consider all of these when I suggested them as compromises.
They also refused to keep my complaint open as I remained dissatisfied. So long term their complaints list will have no entries and they will think they are doing OK

ForumUser7

MoneySavingTart said:

born_again said:

MoneySavingTart said:

First direct confirmed to me yesterday that they deleted after "a year or so"
told them that was a deal breaker.

Why is it a deal breaker, when you have not made any payments to that entity for over a year & their details may no longer be valid. It is the bank protecting you from making a payment to the wrong details.
It is only the same as a DD is invalid after 13 months of inactivity.

The deal breaker was with respect to the First Direct reply when I asked them if they deleted recipients. He said would you like to continue with opening an account. No I said your deletion policy is a deal breaker

I expect my bank to give me control over when payees get deleted
Possible other ways could be in order of decreasing acceptability.
1) We have introduced a new feature. you can download a text file of all your payees.
2) email me saying " we are considering deleting the following payees. If you dont respond in 30day we will go ahead"
3) email to say "we have had to delete the following payees, their details are in the list of recently cancelled payees and you can restore any you still need with a single mouse click..
Nationwide refused to consider all of these when I suggested them as compromises.
They also refused to keep my complaint open as I remained dissatisfied. So long term their complaints list will have no entries and they will think they are doing OK

@moneysavingtart - A financial provider will unfortunately close your complaint if they view it as 'resolved' - this includes if they cannot come to an agreement with you, but they believe they have offered a suitable resolution if they deem it necessary. Have you got a final response letter from them? If so, this should give you your FOS referral rights which would be the next step.

That said, the FOS doesn't like to get involved in 'commercial judgment', which I think unfortunately this may fall under. Similarly, they are unable to force a bank to change their policy in situations like this.

The kind of thing they may say is something like this: It's ultimately a matter of commercial judgement on the part of the bank to determine what products and services it offered - and under what terms. We wouldn't look to intervene with the legitimate use of the banks judgement.

If you wish to refer to the FOS, you can of course do this - I just thought it would be irresponsible of me not to mention the above.

Good luck with any further escalation, I agree that banks should aim to give more of a degree of customisation, to make their accounts suitable for each of their individual customers, but this would be more costly for them - therefore I can see why they are reluctant to do this.

They would be unlikely to discuss an individual change to your account for you such as this, but I am surprised they didn't say they would feed it back to their internal feedback team for future consideration - if you wish to do this, you can use their feedback form https://www.nationwide.co.uk/contact-us/general-feedback/. Try not to include anything account specific, just say it would be helpful if Nationwide allowed you to choose how long they retained payees for etc., or gave you advance notice of removal of a payee etc. so you could avoid this occurring. N.B. This does not guarantee they will implement the feature, rather it means it will put it on the radar of the relevant teams that this is a feature customers would like to see.

born_again

FOS will not get involved in banks own internal procedures. So long as they are not breaking one of their regulations. 

MoneySavingTart

@forumuser7
I don't think its worth going to FOS. I can understand that it is NW chosen policy. They did say they would pass my suggestions on but refused to keep me informed of the results. ie my complaint would be separated from the suggestions and I would hear no more.
Well I've made a policy decision now which is to move my faster payments business (at least) to a bank who are not going to delete my payees but allow me to do this when I wish to.

Section62

eskbanker said:

Section62 said:

The risk which does exist is making an error when setting a new payee up, and the possibility of entering the wrong details.  By deleting payees after 13 months Nationwide expose me to the risk that I pay money to the wrong account when having to set up the payee again.  I don't see their actions as any form of protection.

Recreating payees now does subject (most of) them to the Confirmation of Payee validation, which may not have been the case when they were originally created, so that mitigates the chances of errors when recreating.

...unless you have lots of accounts with the banks and building societies that haven't got CoP working yet, or do the account number in the reference field so you get confirmation you are setting up a payment to ACME Building Society, but not confirmation it will go to your own account.

The main point was that Nationwide aren't doing this to protect us, in the way born_again was suggesting.

molerat

born_again said:

MoneySavingTart said:

First direct confirmed to me yesterday that they deleted after "a year or so"
told them that was a deal breaker.

Why is it a deal breaker, when you have not made any payments to that entity for over a year & their details may no longer be valid. It is the bank protecting you from making a payment to the wrong details.
It is only the same as a DD is invalid after 13 months of inactivity.

 DD dormancy was set to 24 months during lockdown and apparently still is.  https://www.directdebit.co.uk/faqs/inactive-direct-debits/