On Friday 5/11/04 around 1330 hrs I opened a new BS account in an agency. The initial deposit was by cheque. The guy in the agency gave me a receipt for the cheque and said he would send off the documentation to the BS's one and only office that afternoon. (No indication of the method of shipment of the documentation and cheque over the 35 miles distance was offered). On Sunday 7/11/04 I looked at my on line bank account and the cheque is shown as a debit dated Saturday 6/11/04.
Now if the agency, the BS and my bank can do that that fast, why can't the Halifax / HBOS?
Not really sure, my guess is the BS clearings bank is the same as your own bank (branch (or branch group) - I think Lloyds TSB have a system allowing a cheque to be immediately debited at any branch as the teller can check the signiture on screen) eg the coventry bs use HSBC in coventry, that or the agency sent the documentation to the head office and the cheque to your bank for special presentation and for some reason it was dealt with on a saturday.
I know that at work we have paid cheques to a HP company for the deposit payment and they have debited them immediately so there could be some system where the cheque is provisionally presented electronically or by phone and funds are allocated - subject to signiture verification on presentation to your bank when they physically recieve it.
After the cheque was paid in at 1330 it would have either made its way from they agency to the BS Clearing Bank (not neccesarily the branch that the main office of the BS use - as the application could have been sent separatly and the cheque paid to a suspense account) and been included in the Interim Clearing bags at about 1430, or the Final Clearing bags during the evening, otherwise it went back to the BS office and was included in their Clearing Bags or the Clearing bags of their Clearing Bank's branch.
Either way it would have arrived at the Clearing Bank's Voucher Processing Centre, and as the previous poster said debited and credited immediately as both accounts must have been with that bank, by this time the Voucher Processing Centre would have been working in the early hours of saturday and hence the debit was posted to the account on the saturday.
For instance i know that HSBC cheques drawn on a branch paid into an account held at that branch over that branch's counter will be paid overnight, this is only a historical thing from the days when the cheques were processed at the branch, so in that case all the work could be done overnight. Today all the vouchers are sent off for processing, but House Cheques into house accounts at the branch are still processed overnight. There is no real reason why a cheque from another HSBC branch cant be, but its not how the system is currently set up.
Hope this explains some of those issues, feel free to ask more!!
In message , dont_reply_to snipped-for-privacy@crapbin.org.uk writes
As others have said, the guy at the b/soc agency happened to pay the cheque into the b/socs account at the drawee of your cheque, OR at a branch of the same Bank as your drawee.
Halifax/HBOSs problem is twofold. The first is that after Halifax demutualised and became a *bank* they werent a *clearing bank* in the old sense of the expression and didnt adopt the same practices. E.g. for some of their accounts they have just a few sorting codes at head office, and just a few main bank account numbers which are subdivided into 'roll numbers'. On the other hand, BOS where a minor clearing Bank with each branch having its own sorting code and each account having a separate bank account number. Now that they have combined they just cant get their two completely different systems to work together as one.
Its a bit like trying to combine an electric lawn mower with an 8 cylinder straight diesel truck engine and hoping to combine to form a F1 petrol V6.
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