• This topic has 37 replies, 13 voices, and was last updated 8 years ago by IHN.
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  • BACS transfers ? A simpleton's question.
  • cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    I’m currently waiting for some money to arrive at my account, having been sent by BACS at some point on Monday.

    I’m a little excited at the prospect, as much of it will be going straight to my LBS , in return for a new bicycle and significant upgrades for the g/f’s bike.

    Ok , so I get the 3 to 5 day thing ( oh how quaint and antiquated ).

    My question is this, the answer may prevent me from repeatedly calling phone banking and feeling like Bart Simpson in his ” Where’s my spy camera ? Where’s my spy camera ? Where’s my spy camera ? ……..” scene.
    Does the system ‘ update’ realtime , or, are there specific times of day by which these transactions take place ?

    IHN
    Full Member

    It varies between banks, but generally BACS transactions update overnight. So, basically, if it’s not in your account now, it (probably) won’t be in until tomorrow or Friday morning.

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    OK , thanks IHN !

    I’ll try and concentrate on my work then, instead of thinking about setting up my new bike whilest the local trails are still dry and the sun’s up !

    Still looking forward this evening though, on the original bike !

    IHN
    Full Member

    No problem. To be honest, if they did actually send it in business hours on Monday, it should be in your account this morning. It’s a three-day cycle (I could go into more detail, but you’d probably feel the urge to shoot yourself. Or me. Or both of us 🙂 )

    Trimix
    Free Member

    They update a few times during the day, not just once. But they don’t always stick to the same time and it depends what system they look at. So the cashiers may or may not see the same info as the back office.

    Short answer is you may as well ask in the morning, after lunch and just before the bank closes.

    DrJ
    Full Member

    When I send stuff, my bank says it will arrive in a couple of hours, and then it’s up to the receiving bank when they stick it in your account. In 2015 there’s no real excuse for that not happening more or less instantaneously, and indeed when I send money to my daughter (FD -> Lloyds) it is there in a few hours.

    bigyinn
    Free Member

    BACS should normally take no more than 24 hours at the most. Are you sure that CHAPS wasn’t used? Im led to believe that this is used for larger transactions (mortgages for example) so may take longer due to the higher value perhaps?

    edit CHAPS apparently is quicker than BACS. BACS takes 3 BANKING days (whatever that is).

    bigyinn
    Free Member

    1. Bacs, CHAPS & Faster Payments: What’s the difference?
    2. Three popular UK Payment methods… Most forms of UK business payments are now covered by Bacs, CHAPS or Faster Payments. ? Bacs payments – take 3 banking days to process, but cost just a few pence to make. ? CHAPS payments – faster than Bacs, but costs more (usually between £25- £30). ? Faster Payments – quicker than Bacs, cheaper than CHAPS. This presentation will give you an overview of each payment method including what they are used for, how to use them, and the security provided by each one.
    3. Bacs (Bankers’ Automated Clearing Services) was launched in 1968. Bacs is the central payment system used to process several different types of electronic payments. The vast majority of Bacs payments are Direct Debits or Direct Credits. Bacs payments take a minimum of 3 banking days to process, and cost just a few pence to make. What can I use Bacs payments for? Bacs payments are used for Direct Debits and regular payments from businesses such as wages and pensions. If a payment is time-critical, Bacs payments may not be the best option. Faster Payments and CHAPS are quicker.

    http://www.slideshare.net/AccessPay/bacs-chaps-faster-payments-difference

    bigyinn
    Free Member

    I’d hang fire until Friday until chasing them.

    DrJ
    Full Member

    Bloody hell – you can send stuff around the world in 3 days.

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Definately by BACS ( Well that’s according to the bored sounding young man, at the large insurance business, from whence it is coming, the same young man who doesn’t know his ‘net’ from his ‘gross’ ( oo er ) ).
    It’s not an astronomical amount, but will help me with a new bike and fund a summer road trip in the van.

    sandwicheater
    Full Member

    Hold on, think you’ve all missed the point of this thread.

    OP, what bike are you getting?

    ourmaninthenorth
    Full Member

    OP – just go to your LBS, credit card in hand (this is better for you anyway), and then as soon as the cash lands in your account pay off your CC straight away. Ta-da! No interest to pay, full consumer rights protected

    And you get the bike RIGHT NOW! Which is what counts, right? 😀

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Ourmaninthenorth :

    Oh for it to be that simple !

    My bank. A retail one, based in Yorkshire, with Scottish cousins and a governmental fairy godmother, has had its credit card returned.
    Last time I paid it up, it was returned to them in pieces resembling tiles for a model railway station roof.
    Too many years of me paying them, then, when I needed help……….

    I’ll just be patient.

    ourmaninthenorth
    Full Member

    Ah. Fair enough, and I don’t blame you for the frustration with their distinctly non-customer friendly practices!

    Patience and a shiny bike at the weekend it is. Enjoy it!

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Thank you !

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Sorry sandwicheater……….Nowt boutique, replacing my 2008 trance with a new Trance SX, slightly altered from standard spec. Girlfriend gets new wheels and fork for her bike.
    Meanwhile , my old bike goes to a mate who can’t afford to upgrade his hardtail in the way he wants, or buy a new bike. In turn his hardtail is going to another friend who just wants to get into riding. Everyone wins.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    bigyinn – Member

    BACS should normally take no more than 24 hours at the most.

    BACS isn’t capable of doing a payment in 24 hours. The actual clearing part of it’s not really slow but there’s tons of fannying about at either end, more so with personal banking

    (it’s actually a one-day transfer method rather than a 3-day, it just has an administrative and processing lead-time. If you’re a corporate bacstel user, the funds leave your account on the same day as they reach the destination, but you send the payment instruction 2 days earlier. As a personal customer the bank’ll take the money from your account on day one and escrow it. Not really as most assume to profit from it, but because otherwise you could send a BACS payment funds-checked against your account today, then spend the money tomorrow, and the payment would still go even though your account is empty).

    Basically think of it as surface mail, there’s faster methods but sometimes there’s no need to be fast.

    Oh yeah, the OP! As far as I know, all UK clearing banks still do their BACS crediting overnight so if it’s not in your account at opening time, it’s not coming today, unless something out of the ordinary has happened. That might have changed but I doubt it. If you’re with a building society or some oddity bank like airdrie savings, different situation, abacuses involved.

    IHN
    Full Member

    all UK clearing banks still do their BACS crediting overnight so if it’s not in your account at opening time, it’s not coming today, unless something out of the ordinary has happened.

    So what I said in Post 2…

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Thanks guys.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    IHN – Member

    So what I said in Post 2…

    Yes, I humbly apologise for confirming that your post was correct 😕

    IHN
    Full Member

    I humbly apologise for confirming that your post was correct

    Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be narky. You definitely confirmed this bit

    I could go into more detail, but you’d probably feel the urge to shoot yourself. Or me. Or both of us

    🙂

    Northwind
    Full Member

    Fair point! I have all this stuff still stuck in my head and sometimes I have to let it out or I come out in a rash

    (I’m a barrel of laughs when the charity people come round and try to get me to sign up to direct debits. SAY THE WORDS)

    Rio
    Full Member

    Basically think of it as surface mail

    That’s not far from the truth – when the processing cycle was designed bank payments were transferred to and from BACS on tapes carried by vans. Telecoms only took over in the 1990s when it could approach the bandwidth of a Transit on the M1.

    IHN
    Full Member

    Thems were the days, jumpers for goalposts, eh, wasn’t it? Clearing cycles these days don’t know they’re born, etc,

    P-Jay
    Free Member

    BACS is shit, for anyone who still cares “Banking Days” would be more honestly known as “full working days” meaning if you send a BACS on Monday – that day doesn’t count, So you have Tues, Weds, Thurs as your “banking days” and the money finally arrives in the recipients account on Friday – sometime before 9am.

    The banks can argue all they like about how and why it takes so long and what hoops they have to jump through, but frankly it’s all bullshit – the simple fact is that during these “banking days” the sender doesn’t have use of it, nor does the recipient – the bank does – hundreds of thousands of bank transfers happen every day in the UK, so there’s ALWAYS millions and millions of pounds in the financial ether that the banks can ‘gamble’ with.

    Since 2008 the actual transaction takes a few millionths of a second to go through and about 20 mins for the various systems to catch up, but the sending bank wants it for a bit and the receiving bank wants it for a bit to play with, in 2011 the courts got fed up with the banks making lots of money for dong very little (a far from unique event of course) and enforced ‘Faster Payments’ but the legislation doesn’t cover every eventuality.

    Anyway, OP the money will be with you sometime between 00:01 and 09:00 on Friday morning, assuming the Insurance Company has done what it says it’s done.

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Ta ! Ah Well, still something to look forward to.

    Right now about to stick me bike in the van and nip up to the woods for a while. At least I still have cash for a curry afterwards and a pint or two of good ale on ‘ no riding tonight it’s pub night ‘ Thursday !

    Northwind
    Full Member

    P-Jay – Member

    BACS is shit, for anyone who still cares “Banking Days” would be more honestly known as “full working days” meaning if you send a BACS on Monday – that day doesn’t count, So you have Tues, Weds, Thurs as your “banking days” and the money finally arrives in the recipients account on Friday – sometime before 9am.

    This is really all wrong. If you initiate a bacs payment any time on monday before the cutoff (which for bacstel is probably still 10.30pm, and whenever your bank or bureau says it is for any indirect process) then it can be there on wednesday. If it’s any slower, it’s your bank or bureau that’s delaying it, not the BACS process itself.

    The issue of funds in limbo/escrow is more complicated, mostly because you have to understand the clearing cycle properly- it doesn’t work quite like you think because as a personal or small banking customer you never really deal with BACS payments firsthand. I described it a wee bit up the page but it’s nonsimple and dull.

    IHN
    Full Member

    I agree with Northwind.

    mefty
    Free Member

    He’s with your old outfit Northwind.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    To be fair, they are a pretty bad bank 😆 But I’m going to put 10p on the insurance company not sending it when they said they did.

    geetee1972
    Free Member

    I thought that there was a regulatory change recently that required BACS to work more or less on the same day/real time?

    Even if that is not the case, why is it that sometimes I can get a BACS credit instantaneously when other times it does take a few days?

    For example when transfering bike funds from my Bikepal account, the credit shows up in seconds. When we pay our child carer her monthly salary, the payment is instructed for the 28th of the month and shows up in her account the same day. But then last week a refund from Evans took three days to appear.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    Various sorts of reasons for that- people still use BACS as a shorthand for “bank transfer” but if you get a fast one, it came through faster payments not BACS. Or possibly CHAPS, but probably not, CHAPS is still expensive- it’s the express courier, to FPS’s first class, to BACS’s bulk, slow mail.

    Evans might have used BACS- they’re a big company, they’ll be working in large volumes. Or they might have just waited 3 days before sending. Most delays in payments are caused by the originator, not by the process.

    I don’t know what the state of play is these days with volumes etc. Always assumed that direct credit would wind down to nothing and all credits would transfer to FPS, and BACSTEL would be just for direct debits after a while, but I don’t think that’s happened…

    IHN
    Full Member

    Again, Northwind knows his shizzle, and seems to work in the same glamorous, exciting, coke and hookers in every stationery cupboard, world of retail banking that I do.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    Used to, I escaped about 4 years ago. But nothing changes eh. I always liked the BACS stuff tbh, it’s a nicely knowable size of problem, I kind of miss it. But not the employer, no.

    kcal
    Full Member

    Long time ago I ended up (not quite sure why) on a client visit to the SWIFT HQ outside Brussels (?) where there’s cash, there’s er cash! and a rather swanky building…

    cakefacesmallblock
    Full Member

    Well folks…….The answer was……..At some point during the wee small hours today.

    ” Where’s my bike ?. Where’s my bike ? Where’s my b……………….” 😉

    Interesting discussion. Cheers ! 🙂

    IHN
    Full Member

    Told ya 🙂

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