What could a company do though? Most companies use 3rd party payment processors… if they reject it the company is faced with a choice of contacting the customer for s different number or not being paid. Quoting BACS rules hasn’t helped much up to now (TV licensing…) and in the case of a small company there’s nothing they can do about it anyway.
BACS rules assume a level playing field. You can’t discriminate between accounts, sure… but the rules don’t mean you have to accept details that seem to be incorrect.
In an ideal world, but we know that is simply not endforced. Plus most companies don’t own such a database it’s held by their processor.
When we get a mandate form at work it’s bundled off and sent to our processor. When DD day arrived we get a spreadsheet with a pass or fail in it. If we get a fail we contact the customer for credit card payment and send out a new mandate (because failure automatically cancels the old one).
From our point of view there’s absolutely no difference between ‘customer got the number wrong’ and ‘processor has bad data’ - and the former is more common that you’d think.
Now in our case I’ve not heard of any problems with monzo (not that I necessarily would as I’m not in finance) but it wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t be handled any other way.
In this case, obviously, it’s your processor that has to update it, but that doesn’t change the fact they have a contractual obligation with Bacs to update that sort code database monthly.
Relish has also refused over the phone, but I’m just… not surprised. Too many failures all around with Relish…
Well… I’m hopeful that the saga of updating my TV Licencing direct debit is over. I received an email advising me that my details had been updated and apologising for the difficulty changing it.
Thank you for your recent email, which has been recorded under your complaint reference COM1-XXXXXXX. Please use this number if you wish to contact us again.
I’m sorry for the difficulties you’ve had changing your account details.
Further to this, I can confirm the details have now been amended as requested, along with the payment date.
I’ve checked on the TV licencing site and sure enough, it’s showing up with my Monzo account details, so I’m just waiting for it to appear in the direct debit list in the app now.
Fingers crossed it all goes OK. It’s just a bit of a shame it had to get to that point, but I think my very direct email, along with everyone else here asking, has got the message across. Hopefully people will start to see the site accepting Monzo accounts soon too.
Oh dear, sorry to hear that. It’s possible that even now, it still won’t actually happen - I’m not sure I’ll believe it until the first payment actually comes out. But turning it into a complaint seemed to do the trick for me, so maybe try that if it would make sense…?
Let me know if you’d like more info about what I sent them and the conversation. Would be happy to give you more details privately if so (it doesn’t seem appropriate to post too much conversation history publicly).
Despite the email, looking in app today I find a shiny new direct debit already set up and the corresponding entry in my FD account cancelled. At least they won’t be able to take two lots of money.
After 5 emails, a couple of tweets and a phone call I finally have the TV Licence Direct Debit setup which completes my switch over to Monzo. Interestingly they’ve lumped the December and January payment into one so it won’t be coming out until 2nd January so won’t be totally sure it’s done until then!
Anyone had any use with Co-Operative Energy? I’m changing provider to British Gas anyway soon, and they accepted Monzo fine, but still haven’t been able to update my details with Co-Operative.
Other than that, I’ve been able to change the following since my last update;
Cineworld Unlimited Membership
Affinity Water
Welwyn Hatfield Council Tax.
Tesco Bank Credit Card
It’s been my opinion that the processes and systems in use at Co-Operative Energy are utterly useless. Really questioning why I switched to them when I moved… I figured that after 5 years, they’d have gotten their act together, but it seems not.
Hey, they can’t be any worse than the processes at British Gas. I just got out of an utter nightmare with them, with each resolution leading to worse issues. No one knows what anyone else is doing, systems don’t work and nobody seemed to have the authority to actually fix any problems that occur. I wish I could have billed them for all my time dealing with their mess…
I’m on Bristol Energy now and really happy, their customer service is amazing and everyone is so friendly and it’s gone perfectly.
Bah british gas. I have them for my FIT payments… shower of useless idiots.
They randomly don’t remind you the payment is due
When you enter the details in their website, you get no acknowledgement, leading to…
They have plausible deniability when you query where the payment is and they claim you never applied for it…
When you query, they treat each email as a new query, and you send them their own emails back as proof you’ve already gone over this they tell you to print them out and scan them to PDF because their email system won’t accept anything else.
To crown this, they insist they must send a cheque through the post because their systems don’t support any other method of payment…
Waiting for Bulb to start doing FIT and even though changing is ballache (28 days written notification required!) life is too short to keep dealing with British Gas for much longer…
That perfectly sums up my view on my experience as well. Most people I talked to were quite nice but I wouldn’t wish the overall experience on my worst enemy.
@anon79206303 I also experienced similar issues but tonight I was able to update my bank details online! Seems like TV Licensing is finally recognising Monzo details!
