CHAPS not going through on same dayHe

Fred1_2

greekgirl wrote: »

hello again. It is now Monday almost 2pm and my money is still not in the account from CHAPS transfer which was done on Friday just gone. is this normal? does anyone know? im worried....

thanks

No this is not normal. Even when my solicitor / bank managed to make a similar cockup and render me homeless for a weekend (managed to get the money from my house purchaser but not get it to the vendor's solictor by COB on Friday), everything was all sorted out by 0930 the following Monday. Chase your solicitor and your bank.

Detail all your expenses. In my case, my solicitor and bank refunded me half each as goodwill gestures with neither accepting any responsibility for the cockup.

I have my own suspicion of who was at fault. I am still with the bank but will never use that solicitor again.

Richard_Webster

Greekgirl needs to:

1. Contact her solcitors and ask exactly when the money was sent and how it was sent.
2. Make sure that if she wanted it sent by CHAPS this was made clear to the solicitors.

Very often on a Friday money is received quite late on and priority has to be given to sending money to mortgage lenders to stop interest running on mortgages. If she clearly asked for a CHAPs transfer and gave her solcitors sufficient details to enable the transfer to be made then it should be through by now.

Sometimes people give their solicitors details of accounts that will not receive such transfers.

Icey77

When I sold my last flat the CHAPS payment was to the mortgage company to close down my mortgage, what was left over was sent to me via a cheque payment.

The mortgage provider had priority over the proceeds of the sale as I owed £xxxxx to them and I only got what was left over.

My solicitor told me that it was usual practice to send my portion via cheque which I told him was ridiculous and that I wanted a BACS payment - he gets in interest in the 5 days or so it takes to clear :mad: but that was the way it was. End of. Nowadays, it might be different, our reliance on cheques is falling away and more and more payments are completed electronically. Jolly good I say :rolleyes:

Hope you get it sorted GreekGirl

greekgirl

Hi guys
thanks for all the responses!

just fyi money went in at 4pm... so in my mind late... i did bug the SOL...

fyi his response was

I do not know the time the money will be in your a/c. As I advised previously, once the money has left my firm’s a/c, it is entirely in the hands of the banking system.

You will appreciate that money starts to move from the bottom of a conveyancing chain once the first buyer’s solicitor has received money, which will normally be from at least two sources. Once that money is in, it is sent up the chain to the next solicitor, where the same process is repeated.

You will understand that all of this can take quite a time; and that each time money is sent on, it goes back in the system and once again we are all at the mercy of the bankers. There is nothing more that any of us, be it Jane xxxx, me or any other solicitor, can do.

Delays like this are becoming increasingly common and will no doubt increase as the banking industry tries to cut costs even more.

I can add nothing more to what I have said previously.

So if anyone else finds themselves in this situation... there you go! Pees me off nonetheless...

Best wishes
Greekgirl

Trollfever

I know of solicitors who have gone to lunch on a Friday and then forgot to send on a CHAPS payment.

You need some facts from your solicitor:

Date and time that the payment arrived in their bank account.

Date and time that the bank received instructions from your solicitors to send it on.

IMO your solicitor is using the bank as a scapegoat.

greekgirl

Trollfever wrote: »

IMO your solicitor is using the bank as a scapegoat.

yes your probably right.After 6 months of waiting for the sale of my house to go through im happy now not to ever think about it again. It was the most horrific house sale you can imagine with a very aggressive buyer... . Im just so relieved its all over and we finally banked the money albeit damn late!

silvercar

To be fair to your solicitor, I have had aCHAPS payment blocked by my bank trying to get hold of me to do security checks, when I was sitting in the solicitors office waiting for the money to come through!

Richard_Webster

It may be entirely fair to say that the solcitor has no control over when on a particular day money arrives by CHAPs for reasons explained below, but not in my view, why it does not arrive at all on the day in question.

Does the solicitor have his own CHAPs terminal? Most do, even small outfits like mine. If so they will know when the money went through their head office computer. It normally takes about 30 seconds for the entire transfer to take place through the Banks' computers, once all the right entries have been made and security checks carried out etc. The data entry etc and security checks might take about 10 minutes. We transmit a message to our Bank's HQ computer and it passes it on to the receiving bank's HQ computer that then sends it on to the branch account. If it is too late this will show and we would have to try again the next working day.

If the solicitor does not have a CHAPs terminal he is reliant on his bank to make the transfer. He will e.g. send a fax to his branch with a code on it and they then forward the message to some head office warehouse type place where all the CHAPs payments nationally are made for that bank. That's where the delay can occur. Once it is out of the local branch's hands it goes into black hole and you don't know when it will emerge. It normally is guaranteed to happen during banking hours that day. That's the point OP should press with his/her solicitor. The solicitor will in turn have to ask the local branch of his bank to chase up what happened at their CHAPs centre. If the money does not arrive on the day it was supposed to be sent something has gone wrong and the solicitor should be chasing his bank for answers. (Of course the bank may have a cut-off time, say 2.30pm after which it will not receive any more to process that day - but this sort of detail should be known by the solicitor who should be able to find out the answers.)

To be fair it is not reasonable to expect a solicitor to guarantee that the money will come out the day of completion, simply because of the chain delays mentioned by OP's solicitor. However the solicitor should be able to say when he requested that the transfer be made - on the day of completion or the next working day - and at approximately what time on that day. If he has a CHAPs terminal he will be able to say exactly when it was sent.