This isn’t an ‘official’ scheme, and banks don’t register CPAs as part of your account. They’re just an agreement you have with a merchant that they can continuously bill your card without asking every month. Merchants don’t have to provide your bank with a date of the payment in advance of it - whereas for a Direct Debit they have prior knowledge of the money leaving.
Only if you have the money available. Here are some huge edge cases to consider with this:
(1) What if someone runs a zero-sum balance, and doesn’t have it available in their pot. How does the bank recover their costs, given that if they accepted the payment it’d put you into an unarranged overdraft?
(2) Once you’ve got a solution for the above, how do you differentiate those people that run a zero-sum balance but have the money available in a pot? They won’t want it declining, as the money is available.
(3) If we base it all on ‘the date it’s taken’ and find some companies don’t charge on bank holidays, what do you do? Move the money from pots before the bank holiday weekend, or after?
(4) How do individual companies treat shorter months? Do they bill every 28 calendar days, or do they just bill on “the last working day” of the month?
If the answer to either 1 or 2 is that this should be checked before authorising a payment, then the kicker is that the bank only have a split second to respond - that’s a lot of work to authorise a payment, above what they already have to do.
Answers 3 and 4 are really important for the people mentioned in 1 and 2 (zero-sum accounts) as they don’t want money sat in their main balance for the entire Easter weekend ‘just because’.
There’s the choice of keeping a ‘total finances’ value, which is the sum of all pots, but then you get into the realms of whether the money is only available in the wrong pot - what if it’s locked? What if it’s an ISA? What if it’s a 12 month locked ISA?
The official delay was announced after lockdown - they were expecting to launch on the last day of Q1.
and all of the open banking changes/improvements, business accounts, the web app for business accounts, adoption of the increased contactless limits (and mechanisms in app to reset these), reporting to Equifax CRA, making credit reports available in-app, improving the pot offerings, Salary sorter, and pay from pots.