Confirmation of Payee - Santander refusing to send ISA sub to Virgin Money

GeoffTF

Daytona said:

eskbanker said:

In terms of concerns about retrying, if Santander told you that the transaction failed and the money hasn't arrived ten days later, what will convince you that it's not going to happen, or are you happy to just leave it?

Because I complained and told them to transfer the money.

That does not work. You need to give them satisfactory answers to their questions before they will send the money. In my experience, sending £1 usually works even if the COP check fails. Some people just send 1p. You will have a much more convincing case if that payment arrives in your account.

eskbanker

Daytona said:
No response from Santander complaints. 

I messaged VM about the CoP failure, no response. 
Pay UK have refused to say whether Clydesdale, Virgin Money or accounts with the sort code 08 60 64 participate. 
So it's going to the regulator. 

As above, it's not going to the regulator, but once you've logged a complaint with an institution, you have the right to escalate it to the Financial Ombudsman Service if you haven't received a satisfactory response within eight weeks.

It's perhaps going to be tricky to allocate responsibility between Virgin and Santander if the latter is claiming the former doesn't support CoP, but on balance I think I'd be more inclined to suspect Virgin, given oft-reported issues with their poor post-merger integration.

However, even when a CoP check fails, or can't be completed, you should still be able to proceed at your own risk, so I'd agree with the approach of complaining to both if you wish to pursue the matter.

GeoffTF

eskbanker said:

However, even when a CoP check fails, or can't be completed, you should still be able to proceed at your own risk, so I'd agree with the approach of complaining to both if you wish to pursue the matter.

Agreeing that it is at your own risk seems to be in addition to giving satisfactory answers to their questions, not instead of it. Plenty of people will agree it is at their own risk, and then demand compensation when it turns out to be a scam or a mistake on their part.

I have recently found that quite large payments go through without question, despite failing CoP. The security quizzes cost the bank money, and I do not expect that they are keen on asking the same questions and getting the same answers, unless they think it is necessary.

eskbanker

GeoffTF said:

eskbanker said:

However, even when a CoP check fails, or can't be completed, you should still be able to proceed at your own risk, so I'd agree with the approach of complaining to both if you wish to pursue the matter.

Agreeing that it is at your own risk seems to be in addition to giving satisfactory answers to their questions, not instead of it. Plenty of people will agree it is at their own risk, and then demand compensation when it turns out to be a scam or a mistake on their part.

I have recently found that quite large payments go through without question, despite failing CoP. The security quizzes cost the bank money, and I do not expect that they are keen on asking the same questions and getting the same answers, unless they think it is necessary.

To the best of my knowledge there are completely separate checks performed by banks when conducting transfers like this:

1. Confirmation of Payee, visible to the sender, prior to sending
2. Their unrelated internal fraud algorithms, during processing

and the fact that a payment passes CoP doesn't mean that it'll get through the later check, as well as the other way round, i.e. CoP failures not being held downstream.

However, in this case, Santander are specifically telling OP that CoP failure prevents the transaction from proceeding, which isn't how it's meant to work!

"I have looked and it appears that the account you are attempting to send the payment to is not registered with confirmation of Payee so we were unable to verify that the payment was going into an account in your name. It appears this is the reason the transaction failed."

masonic

It's possible that the message being conveyed was that because it had failed CoP checks the transaction came under additional scrutiny by the fraud team, and they ultimately decided they couldn't let it through because they were unable to confirm the destination by other means.

We don't know what would have happened if the OP had phoned Santander around the time the payment was made. Based on the OP's comments, the transaction was attempted on 17th March. The thread was started 9 days later, presumably shortly after the quoted text from the live chat session was received. As far as I'm aware, the way these things go is that they request the customer calls them or attempt to make contact by phone themselves. But if this does not happen within a few days, they will cancel the transaction. 

The attempts to resolve over email or live chat are not going to be successful. Santander will want to speak to the customer by phone. They will want to be sure they are speaking to the customer and will be trained to look out for signs of the customer being coerced or coached through the questioning, which is not possible through text.

GeoffTF

eskbanker said:

However, in this case, Santander are specifically telling OP that CoP failure prevents the transaction from proceeding, which isn't how it's meant to work!

That is definitely not how it has worked for me with Santander for many Faster Payments that did not pass CoP to several banks. If it was only a £1 test transaction, they all went straight through IIRC. After that, the first £1,000 sometimes went through without phoning them. Otherwise, the payment went though after one phone call. I have not have problems with subsequent payments. I always had to phone Santander for £50K+, but the payments all went through after that. The most that I have ever had to do was to make one phone call, and the payment went through, despite not passing CoP.

GeoffTF

Perhaps I should add that all my payments that did not pass CoP were to banks that did not support CoP, as far as I know. Failing a CoP check may be considered to be more serious than not being able to carry out a CoP check. The screen capture above says that Virgin is not a member of the CoP service.

friolento

eskbanker said:

"I have looked and it appears that the account you are attempting to send the payment to is not registered with confirmation of Payee so we were unable to verify that the payment was going into an account in your name. It appears this is the reason the transaction failed."

This happens when the receiving bank has not yet added the account to the COP system. With many providers, new accounts can pass a COP check immediately but with some, an overnight run seems to be required. For example, a new Nationwide current account can't be detected until the next working day. It would not surprise me in the least if Virgin ISAs can also only be checked the next day. Santander will not let you proceed with a payment if they cannot find the account number despite the provider being in the COP scheme. IIRC, there is at least one other bank (Starling? Chase?) which also prohibits such payments. Seems reasonable to me.

eskbanker

friolento said:

eskbanker said:

"I have looked and it appears that the account you are attempting to send the payment to is not registered with confirmation of Payee so we were unable to verify that the payment was going into an account in your name. It appears this is the reason the transaction failed."

This happens when the receiving bank has not yet added the account to the COP system. With many providers, new accounts can pass a COP check immediately but with some, an overnight run seems to be required. For example, a new Nationwide current account can't be detected until the next working day. It would not surprise me in the least if Virgin ISAs can also only be checked the next day.

In this case, OP already confirmed nine days between destination account being opened and the failed funding attempt:

Daytona said:
VM ISA opened on 8th March 24

Santander to VM ISA transfer attempted and failed on 17th March

TheEmerald

Apologies if this has already been suggested but if not it might help you.
I am not able to add to a new ISA from my nominated bank account because all monies have to be sent to a current account in my name and they will not release the money to the ISA provider. The only way to get round this would be for me to move the money into another current account but I would not have time to change my nominated account before the end of the tax year.