Santander, Conf of Payee and Al Rayan Bank

TraySelect

I've been with Santander for 10 years. It's my main bank account.

I have over 20 current and savings accounts I make payments to and from this Santander current account..

When I set up new payments to one of my accounts elsewhere, I want to call the account by its name, eg Building Society X.

It means I can see at a glance in my list of payees which account I want to transfer money to.

If I didn't do this, I'd have a list of 20+ payees, all labelled with my name. It would be a time-consuming hassle to I/D and check I was getting my cash to the account of mine I wanted the cash to go to.

Since Confirmation of Payee came in, I've had to repeatedly answer Santander questions about 'is it a scam', 'have you been contacted ...,' 'if it's scam you're liable not us'. And so on. I've just put up with this, noting that other banks give nowhere near the number of warnings as Santander.

This week I wanted to make a payment to Al Rayan Bank. 

The maturity amount from last year's Al Rayan FTD had been paid into my Santander current account the day before. It was this sum I wanted to reinvest.

I have had a banking relationship with Al Rayan via Santander for three years. Each year, when the Al Rayan account matures, I have set up a new account which has a different number, so it's a new payee.

What happened next was awful. I couldn't set this payment up this online - the payment mandate was refused. I thought it was because I wanted to call the account 'MY NAME Al Rayan' [so I could I/D this account in my list of Santander payees].

I phoned CS. They refused to call the payee 'MY NAME Al Rayan'.  I pointed out the long list of payees I had set up, eg 'MY NAME Building Soc X'.

They then said I had to be transferred and that I would have to wait 10 minutes for them to check a few things before speaking to me.

I was transferred, and I had to explain everything over again. Increased 'security checks' were carried out. The promised call-back to my registered phone number didn't happen, in my stress about all this I forgot my phone was on silent.

I had to phone Santander for the third time. They went through the extremely long list of questions and said they'd call me back. They didn't.

I understand CoP requirements. I understand fraud issues.

a few Qs if anyone can help:

- how do people who bank with Santander manage to set up payee names of their accounts elsewhere in a way that works for them to I/D which of their accounts they're sending cash to?

- or if you have a long list payees all in your name, how do you differentiate whiuch account is which?

- has anyone else had problems with Santander in relation to Al Rayan?

mebu60

I am with Santander. I set up the payment to the name of the institution for exactly the reasons you highlight. I need to be able to differentiate who the payee is. It would be useless them all being me! 

For a new payee, if the receiving bank is on CoPS I may initially set it up as my name to check it's me but then I go back and change it to the bank / BS name. I answer the subsequent questions as required to make the payment go through. 

Grouchy

I bank with them online (not App) and yes it's a bit frustrating, especially if you click Payments and Transfers from the top of the screen you can get a long list with lots of MY NAME as payee and very little detail.  However, from the left panel you choose Pay an Existing Payee, choose the a/c from, then the list of payees is more detailed with the payee name, reference, a/c # etc (for the ones where I am the payee, I always add a reference like Santa to STB or YBS 50).

Mebu60 can you edit a payee?  I didn't know that.  Or perhaps only in the app?

Never had anything to do with Al Rayan.

mebu60

Grouchy said:

I bank with them online (not App) and yes it's a bit frustrating, especially if you click Payments and Transfers from the top of the screen you can get a long list with lots of MY NAME as payee and very little detail.  However, from the left panel you choose Pay an Existing Payee, choose the a/c from, then the list of payees is more detailed with the payee name, reference, a/c # etc (for the ones where I am the payee, I always add a reference like Santa to STB or YBS 50).

Mebu60 can you edit a payee?  I didn't know that.  Or perhaps only in the app?

Never had anything to do with Al Rayan.

You can't edit a payee name once set up. In the set up process you can check CoPS then go back in the set up process to change the name. Whenever possible I will do a test payment of £1 or other modest amount for the first payment anyway. 

An issue with using reference field for your purposes is that some institutions require specific account number information in there where they use another bank themselves. 

GeoffTF

If you select Pay Existing Payee and click on one of the entries, it will show the full details. If I transfer money to a term account, I delete the payee when the transfers have been completed. I only have two active easy access accounts. I delete any payments that I will no longer use.

Bridlington1

I do a similar sort of thing to @Grouchy with the references in general. Each reference usually consists of 2-3 characters denoting the bank I'm sending the funds from followed by the name of the bank/account I'm sending it to. E.g. a payment from Santander to Ulster has the reference "SA2 Ulster", Nationwide to RBS becomes "ND RBS" etc. 

I appreciate this next one probably isn't for everyone but it works well for me I've found. These days I don't really have a main bank account as such, instead I have a main cluster of accounts that are all used as nominated accounts, the main four being Santander, Nationwide, Ulster and First Direct, though I'm slowly incorporating TSB into this list as well. I then have a spreadsheet in which I list each of my payees that I have with each of my accounts as well as listing which accounts are used as nominated bank accounts for what.

The advantage of splitting everything across multiple accounts I've found is when it comes to having multiple accounts with the likes of Monmouthshire BS, YBS etc, which require the reference to be your account number. I have 4 regular savers with MBS so rather than setting up one payee to MBS and changing the reference each time I pay into a different regular saver, I pay into one regular saver from my main Santander account, another from a second Santander account, another from First Direct, with the final one being paid from Ulster. I never change the references and they're all listed on the spreadsheet so it is pretty easy for me to know which one is which.

TraySelect

Thanks for all your comments.

I've tried mebu60's suggestion with a non-Santander account, and that worked - I got the payee name to be one that ID'd the account for me.

There was something that red-flagged Santander's systems with my trying to set up my Al Rayan FTD account for payment, hence the payment was never set up.