Direct Debit, "No instruction" error

[cottonfoo]

I've been sent a very aggressive letter from a finance company telling me that a direct debit has been declined, and that if I don't pay up the 40-odd quid, with a 40 quid admin fee on top, I'll be taken to court. This is just my car insurance, and the instruction has been fine since March 2009.

I've spoken to the bank and they say they cannot see any attempt at a DD from them this month. It sounds to me as if the DD presentation was wrong.

I'm going to call them tonight but I'm wondering what the likely causes of "No instruction" are, and if it's more likely to be an error on the part of the person attempting to debit rather than my bank. There were of course funds available, and another DD went out on the same day as this one usually does so there doesn't seem to be any issue at the bank end. I can see the DD is still set up via my online banking.

Thanks.

[Leebo77]

It could be:

1. Your bank have refused the claim incorrectly.
2. The originator (ins co) have claimed under another reference or have claimed using another OIN (originators ID) or even against the wrong account number.

For a DD to work there obviously has to be a valid mandate in place (which you say that there is). After that, on a transactional basis, the originator has to claim using 3 matching data elements:
Account number
OIN
Reference

In my experience it's the originators that get this stuff wrong.

HTH

[cottonfoo]

Thanks, just the kind of info I need so I can check both sides of the equation and see what happened.

[vdp1]

This would be close premium finance then. The last time I had dealings with them I threatened to report them to the fraud squad.