UK banks are shortchanging customers

Which bank are you with? My bank will clear personal account cheques immediately.

It is Barclays.

I believe it is allowed to do that by Banking rules.

The check I deposited was from Barclays, only thing I did was depositing at branch other than mine. Though I see it showing against my account in Bank's computer I was told the amount will be mine to use after further 72 hours.

I was told the same day clearance is possible if check from account holder A goes into the the account of account holder B and both accounts of A and B are at the same branch.

In message , Eric Jones writes

Truncation? by 'clear' do you mean 'pay' i.e. a cheque drawn upon a different drawee branch of the same bank can be instantly and irreversibly 'paid'?

Yep.

Yep. It shows in your account because you have paid it in to your account. Despite having recorded the cheque as having been received for your account your branch hasnt actually got the dosh for it yet from the branch upon which it is drawn. That wont happen for 3 days.

Yep, that all sounds right to me.

The Cheques and Bills of Exchange acts have been amended to allow for 'truncation' so that cheques do not have to be physically presented to the drawee. In addition BACS etc procedures are changing. Banks would love to do all this a lot quicker but it is a mammoth task.

I hope this thread isnt going to degenerate into one of those 'theyve got computers so it must be possible' type arguments.

John Boyle wrote on Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:13:34

Please delete alt.clearing.technology from followups. It has nothing to do with UK banks. TIA.

All the banks have agreed to a standard clearing time to commence laster this year so at long last it will be consistent.

Yes once a cheque has been presented, if there is sufficient funds to pay it,it has not been stopped at time of presentation and signatures appear to be correct then the cheque is shown as cleared to beneficiary account. For large denomination cheques over a certain amount which I will not divulge here then extra steps are taken before it is marked as paid.

In message , Eric Jones writes

Thanks Eric, you are more up to date than I.

For my own info do you mind answering a couple of queries?

How is the sig checked and by whom?

Is this irrevocable? (say the sig is incorrect).(I ask because I am curious to know how does the Deregulation (Bills of Exchange) Order 1996 s4.(1) apply in so far as this order allows the drawee to request a physical presentment of the cheque within 24 hours of 'virtual' presentment in order to consider payment, at which subsequent point payment could be denied)

Signatures are on a database which can be accessed by anyone with a workstation - this is checked by cashier when accepting credit/cheque. If any doubt or signature is not on the database then the cheque goes round the 'clearing' cycle. They tell us that about 85% of customers are held for us to check. The Clearing centre then gets the job of sorting out what to do with cheques where we do not hold an electronic copy of the signature - either contacting the customer to returning the cheque 'No mandate held'. Whilst this may be inconvenient to customers it is better than taking a chance/loss especially on large sum cheques. All cheques where house or other all get sent to clearing house every day. We no longer keep them at the branch.

Because UK customers dont want to pay direct charges for their bank accounts to be operated so Banks have to cover their costs and gain their profits by less obvious means.

I'm sure that if you volunteered to pay 10 pounds per month for your banks services...........

In message , Eric Jones writes

Thanks Eric.

Lloyds apparently stopped doing this a while ago. Their profits from it were really quite small, but resulted in a certain amount of customer negativity.