Banks bouncing back payments

[StevieBee]

Had this three times in the last week. Send payment and a day later, the money comes back. Using stored account details that have previously worked fine. Two are companies and one is an individual. My bank can give no explanation and the recipients cannot get answers from their banks.

Anyone else experiencing this?

[Chrocco]

Yes, we’ve had this a few times with Metro Bank. All our account manager will tell me is the below:

Metro Bank cannot complete the requested transaction. In accordance with Terms and Conditions, Metro Bank may recall or not make a payment where to do so would be outside Metro Bank’s risk appetite. Please refer to section 11.2 of our Personal Terms and Conditions. If this payment was to be attempted again, it will be returned.

Luckily we have another bank account with a different bank so paid through that.

[loafer123]

I had it with Metro this week...had to go through the whole payment thing three times.

Eventually I got there, but not impressed.

[2 sMoKiN bArReLs]

Might be related.

I tried to send a payment & it recognised that the payee name did not match that held by the receiving bank. That is a new thing to me (and I've made thousands of payments over the years).

[Drawweight]

I noticed that my bank (BOS) now matches the recipients name with their bank account.

And not before time.

[cherie171]

2 sMoKiN bArReLs said:

Might be related.

I tried to send a payment & it recognised that the payee name did not match that held by the receiving bank. That is a new thing to me (and I've made thousands of payments over the years).

It's probably this. The major banks (Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Santander, HSBC Group (excluding M&S Bank) and Nationwide Building Society) were all due to go live on 31st March with the "Confirmation of Payee" system that checks the name you have on the payment to the actual name on the account, and rejects if there is a discrepancy. With CV19, I think they've been allowed until the end of June instead. How flexible the checks are, and whether they allow for initials instead of the name (and vice-versa), I don't know.

I would check the saved name you have on file against the official name that your customers have on their bank.

[2 sMoKiN bArReLs]

It will sort out the money launderers.

When I worked I always insisted on a proof of bank details before I made a first payment. You'd be amazed how often the bank details were actually different to the invoicing entity.

It led to some interesting conversations!

[48k]

StevieBee said:

Had this three times in the last week. Send payment and a day later, the money comes back. Using stored account details that have previously worked fine. Two are companies and one is an individual. My bank can give no explanation and the recipients cannot get answers from their banks.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Yep - for the second month running, Santander have bounced my monthly Microsoft Azure payment. Something that has been working fine for years has suddenly got their fraud department twitchy for some reason, and I get a "can you confirm this payment is genuine" text message and when I reply Y it tells me to manually make the payment which also fails and I have to phone the fraud department to get them to push some buttons on the back end. No reason or explanation given as to why they suddenly think Microsoft is not to be trusted.