This conversation started in another topic when @N26throwaway said:
I have one friend, who withdraws their entire fortnightly salary from the bank their employer prefers they use, and deposits the full amount into a different bank, who they prefer to use, because it’s faster and cheaper than a wire
Wait, US employers can effectively choose your bank for you?!
Wow! Anti-competitive or what?
There was someone on here who worked for Lloyds (I think) and I’m sure they needed to be paid into that account.
Speaking from personal experience this was true 20+ years ago, but is not the case now…
Yes, they only pay to Lloyds/Halifax/BoS account. 
And what would happen if you quietly CASSed away your Lloyds account?
Nothing, probably. Your employer probably wouldn’t even know.
Yes, you can at least I did when I worked there, basically you couldn’t be onboarded without a Lloyds account but nobody cared after.
I’ve created a new thread so we can talk about this without going too too far off topic!
Do Apple employees (do they have a name? Applers?) get any perks? Or is there a kick back from the bank to Apple for effectively delivering them thousands of salaried accounts without any individual cost of acquisition?
Wow, do CASS really retain the old sort/acc numbers?
Not currently - but the old sort code and account number are used to forward money to your new details for a defined period (we’re talking years).
An alternative model would be to port account numbers like you can with mobile phone numbers - but I don’t think anyone is exploring that right now.
Damn that would be cool. I realise would need massive changes in how things worked. But what a concept.
Yes, it would mean massive changes as currently sort codes are wedded to banks, even “branches” (either physical or virtual) of the bank, so it would be a big change.
I don’t expect it to happen because most people probably don’t have the same attachment to their bank details as they do to their phone number, so there isn’t a huge incentive for banks to develop the capability.
It has been explored by the treasury select committee as an idea in the past, though, so it wouldn’t be a crazy suggestion!
Yes, I know what you mean.
Some of my accounts have a special sort code which I am personally fond of, but I think we are in the minority!
Especially when the average account at Bank X is usually a nonsense jumble of numbers with no relevance at all!
I’ve worked there for a long time and I can say for sure that this is not the case… 
I did think that’s was absolute wrong. I recall when I worked for Halifax HO, at the time we had to be paid using one of their own products. That soon changed a year or 2 later, bonus was we had our own branch in HO that was always fully staffed, so no queuing in the high street.
I have an account like that at TSB, which isn’t that old.
I always thought someone must have switched away and, after a suitable time, I eventually got their recycled number!
yeah, it changed about twenty years ago 
I think it was to pre-empt EU anti-competition regs from memory…
Yes sounds about right timescale wise. I was 16 at the time and think by the time I was 18 we could use any account.
To be fair to them, at that time (pre-Faster Payments) it probably would have been easier and cheaper for them to process payments as internal credits to their own accounts.
Otherwise, they would have had to use BACS Direct Credits, effectively paying their employees three days early to make sure the payment arrived on time.
That would have had cash-flow implications which, it is easy to see, would be best avoided.