Saga Savings difficulty transferring funds

Furbyboy

Just wondering if anyone has had the same issue as I have with the new 4.5% Saga savings account. I opened the account on 16th July, linked my Lloyds current account and attempted to transfer funds into the new Saga account. The shutters came straight down at Lloyds who stopped the payment and asked that I contact their fraud department. I then had the most bizarre conversation with one of the Lloyds fraud team, who wanted to know where I had got details of the Saga account, the interest rate, if someone had tried to sell me the account, etc. I explained the account was shown as a good deal on the MSE site and no Saga employee had coerced me into opening the account, quite ridiculous I thought at the time. I was even more annoyed when the same thing happened again a week later when I tried to deposit more funds. And even more annoyed when I had to contact Lloyds fraud team again and was cut off by three different fraud staff before I got the next payment authorised. I asked the fraud agent why the Lloyds risk engine was throwing up an issue with Saga, they eventually told me their system was flagging the transaction as an impersonation fraud? I telephoned Saga today to ask if they were experiencing any issues with banks blocking funds and their only thoughts were that the major increase in people opening Saga accounts was spooking some of the banks. Interested to hear if anyone else has had the same issue?

mebu60

What amounts were you transferring and do you transact those sorts of values regularly?

Newly_retired

Thanks for the warning. I couldn’t get logged in this morning. It is my first savings account with Saga, not yet funded but now I am inclined not to bother.

friolento

I had my first payment from Santander to Saga blocked by the automatic fraud algorithm, despite having passed Confirmation Of Payee. A young, somewhat overly keen sounding bloke gave me the spiel about APP fraud etc etc and demanded to know why I am putting money into a Saga account yadayadayada, then took the block off. The total call took less than 5 minutes. Since then, I have made numerous deposits of various size amounts to Saga, and from Saga back to Santander, which so far has always been available when I needed it. It's working like a dream - the only thing I am missing is a Saga app.

Whilst it's a minor irritant when transactions to new payees get randomly blocked, it happens, and it happens for good reason. If it happened repeatedly for the same payee, I would file a complaint. But nothing would put me off using the best easy access savings account to park my cash which I need once a month for my Regular Saver accounts and to pay my credit cards.

nigelholl2

I had an absolute mare of a time after opening the account, transferring max sums from NatWest to saga, even the third £13k transfer was blocked & had to speak with fraud team.

I have been with NatWest for over 40 years, and done max transfers chains, two BTL sold last year, and never had an issue.

That said the NatWest fraud team were reasonable to work with, once you could get through the queue, the problem was they don't operate 24/7

Back to normal £1k transfers now & all seems to have settled down

aroominyork

Unless these are isolated incidents, presumably Saga are aware and wanting to act. Is there anything they can do to prevent 'incorrect' alerts being raised?

ToastLady

No problems with transferring sums of £5000 in from BoS, so far anyway. Only did a small test transfer out to see how long it took, which was instant. Would have liked an app but the absence of one hasn't put me off using Saga, as it's the best rate I can get for EA at the moment.

poolboy

No problems here either, NatWest to saga. Only issue I ve ever had was Barclays who kept freezing my account suspecting fraud. They bounced my dds so paid me 50gbp compensation.

jaypers

No issues from Barclays.

Rudyson

Just a thought. Maybe people under 50 transferring funds to Saga is triggering some of the alerts.

1spiral

I opened an account with First Direct a few years back at the time when Nationwide decided to limit their transfers to new accounts to 25K.

This happened around March/April time and our sole purpose of the FD account was to act as the linked account for all our savings accounts. At the start around 50% of the transfers (high 5 figures) got blocked and they always phoned back within the hour to take us through the usual questions. After those questions, the money was released within minutes. Although these calls got less frequent, they continued until in the November we got the last ever call. It has been about 3-4 years now since I last received a call despite us still moving similar sums around. It is all about the algorithm learning your habits.