This morning I intended to pay £7.28 into my NatWest Reward account and managed to pay £728 instead. I think this may be the 4th time I have done something similar, so clearly the decimal point and I have unresolved issues.
Fair enough. My mistake. But that is really where the interesting bit starts, because the transaction itself took seconds. I entered the amount, authenticated it and off it went. NatWest's systems apparently saw nothing particularly remarkable in my paying roughly 100 times the amount I actually intended to pay.
You might have thought that a banking app could spot that sort of thing. It knows the balance. It knows the amount being paid. A simple message saying, "You appear to be paying £728 against a balance of £7.28. Are you sure?" would probably have saved everybody some trouble. Banks are quite capable of detecting unusual transactions when they want to, so this hardly seems beyond the wit of man.
Still, people make mistakes, and software generally allows for that. The problem is that once I have made this particular mistake, I cannot correct it myself.
The £728 has not disappeared. It is sitting as credit on my account. It is still my money. NatWest knows where it came from, knows where it went, knows that both accounts are mine and knows that the receiving account is now substantially in credit. Yet there is no straightforward way for me to reverse the excess payment back to the account it came from.
Instead I have to contact the bank.
That sounds simple enough, until one actually tries it. The automated voice system could not understand what I wanted because, apparently, my problem did not fit one of its approved categories. It had a stock number of things it was prepared to discuss and "I accidentally paid £728 instead of £7.28" was not among them.
At one point I was directed to another telephone number. I rang it. The number was no longer in use.
Eventually I got through to a person. By then I had already been through the bank's security process once, but I had to go through it again. That proved rather more fraught than it needed to be, which added another layer of irritation to a problem that was, at heart, very simple.
And then came the explanation that the transfer back was still "pending", which was why it could take 24 to 48 hours.
That is where the whole thing becomes particularly difficult to defend.
If I use the account to pay a retailer, the transaction is authorised immediately and, from my point of view, the money is gone. I do not get 24 to 48 hours in which everybody pauses for reflection. Yet when the issue is simply returning an obvious excess payment to the account it came from, suddenly the machinery needs a day or 2 to process it.
I appreciate that card settlement and bank transfers are not technically identical processes, and I am not claiming that the banking system literally moves every penny from one ledger to another the instant I tap a card. But that rather misses the customer's point. The system is perfectly capable of making the consequence of my payment immediate. What it apparently cannot do is give me an equally immediate way of correcting an obvious mistake.
And that is the part that grates, because banks have spent the last few decades shifting almost every routine task on to the customer. We transfer our own money, set up our own payments, manage our own cards, authenticate ourselves, download our own statements and generally do most of the things that once required a visit to a branch. Mostly this is an improvement. I have no great desire to go back to queueing behind somebody paying in the contents of a biscuit tin.
But there is an obvious asymmetry here. When automation saves the bank money, I am trusted to manage things myself. When automation would allow me to correct an obvious error, suddenly a bank official has to become involved.
I can pay almost anybody in Britain in seconds. What I cannot apparently do is return my own accidental overpayment to the account it came from.
There may be perfectly sensible regulatory or technical reasons for putting controls around this sort of transaction, and I am not suggesting NatWest has deliberately designed the system so that it can sit on my £720.72 for a couple of days and earn a fortune from it. That would be a fairly heroic claim over £720.72.
But there is still an interesting question of incentives. Making it easy for customers to move money into an account is useful to the bank as well as the customer, so the systems exist and they work quickly. Spending money to make it equally easy for customers to undo their own mistakes is rather less obviously useful to the bank.
And my £720.72 is only my £720.72. Multiply similar errors by however many customers make them across the banking system each day and the total is presumably not trivial. Whether banks make any meaningful profit from those temporary balances is almost beside the point. They certainly have little commercial incentive to make the correction process frictionless.
From the customer's point of view, though, the solution does not appear especially exotic. If an account has been put into credit by a payment from another account in the same customer's name, allow the excess to be returned to the originating account. Authenticate the customer in the usual way, limit the amount to the credit balance and send it back where it came from.
That is essentially an undo function.
If I accidentally delete 5 pages of something in Word, I do not have to telephone Microsoft, negotiate with a voice system that cannot understand why I am calling, get referred to a number that no longer exists, authenticate myself twice and then wait 2 working days for somebody to restore paragraph 7.
I press Ctrl-Z.
Banking has somehow reached the position where I can make the error instantly but cannot undo it instantly, even when there is very little ambiguity about what has happened or where the money should go.
The technology clearly exists to move the money. I have demonstrated that part myself, repeatedly.
After the 4th encounter with this particular problem, I am beginning to suspect that the decimal point is not the only thing that could do with redesigning.
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