How we support Get Paid Early šŸ’ø

Same. HSBC never did/offered this while it was my main account. Monzo was my first experience too.

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Do HSBC offer GPE?

I know it was always visible in the main online banking platform for years.

Me too. I love that it applies to more than just salary too. I’ve had pet insurance claims early, or refunds. As long as its Bacs, its possible ! :heart:

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monzo was also my first experience of get paid early , didnt see it in bank of scotland or lloyds

The only bank I know of which pays you early is Barclays, as they show all Monday’s incoming payments on the Saturday. They don’t do it because they want people to get paid early, it’s just how their payment processing works. I don’t think they do it for other days of the week, e.g. incoming payments on Wednesday won’t be available on Tuesday. At least I’ve never noticed any.

NatWest (and presumably RBS) used to do the same but they stopped it several years ago as it confused too many customers. It wasn’t just Mondays incoming payments that were shown on Saturday, but all Monday’s outgoing payments too and NatWest got lots of complaints about this leaving people with no money over the weekend.

Nationwide and First Direct have never paid early because I’ve had accounts with them for 30 years, so I would have noticed by now. Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and TSB don’t pay early and I don’t think they ever have. I presume HSBC is the same as First Direct and doesn’t pay early. That only leaves Santander and Virgin/Clydesdale, and I don’t know about them.

So it’s certainly not common for banks to pay you early, rather the reverse.

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:wave: Hey ! Sorry for the delay, I wasn’t aware of any other banks offering a GPE like feature as standard so was digging in to that to clue myself up before replying !

I can’t speak for competitors, but the reason our GPE is from 4pm is that it relates to the cut-off after which the sender can’t cancel the credit. If we paid earlier than this and the sender did request to cancel (e.g. ā€œOops! We forgot to remove this ex-employee from payroll so need to cancel this specific paymentā€) then we would be responsible for the cost.

You can imagine how this could be exploited to cost one unlucky bank a whole lot of money !

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It does sound rather like something about how the banks are handling Bacs internally. This is pure speculation, but maybe something like ā€œif a Bacs payment has been received for X amount of time, pay it.ā€ with a job that runs every few hours and checks for ā€œoverdueā€ Bacs payments to mop up anomalies after the main batch job. By Saturday, a payment that was due to clear Monday would’ve past that threshold…

Now that I think about it, I remember I used to get paid earlier than other people if my bank was the same bank that my employer used in one of my previous jobs - which I now suspect was something to do with handling a Bacs credit differently if the sender and recipient were both within the same bank. I wonder if it could be something like that in the mix too for your Thursday → Wednesday one :thinking:

The possibilities are endless :sweat_smile:

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When I worked in teaching the school banked with Natwest, and I banked with Natwest so I’d, sometimes, get paid earlier than those who banked elsewhere.

It didn’t always happen, and I had no choice over whether it came in or not and there was no visibility over the payment until it appeared in my account.

Definitely prefer our version (but I am biased ;))

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I actually remember something like this happening for me many many moons ago with RBS.
Basically payments would clear faster inside the same bank but that was a hidden perk as you had no idea who your employer banked with nor any control unlike Monzo which is far far better.

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What a great read! I love the GPE feature and been using it most months. Getting paid early and then more recently using the ā€œsalary sorterā€ combined with the bill pots and ā€œpay from potā€ virtual cards made my life so much easier.

I used to bank with NatWest and remember always getting paid a full day earlier then everyone else but wasn’t sure if this was due to the ā€œsame bankā€ thing mentioned above. I know I got a letter from NatWest saying they were stopping it due to ā€œregulartory changesā€ or something to that effect.

I now use GPE in combination with Google Sheets export and IFTTT to automate my ā€œsalary sorterā€ since both my monthly outgoings and monthly wages vary slightly from month to month.
I have noticed recently that i’ve been getting a ā€œlots of people are being paid early so it might take a little longerā€ message almost every month, but I do usually request on the stroke of 4pm.

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I have noticed recently that i’ve been getting a ā€œlots of people are being paid early so it might take a little longerā€ message almost every month, but I do usually request on the stroke of 4pm

Thats probably the most likely time you’ll see that message, as the queue is at its max at the start, and unless you’re quick enough to be at the front of the queue, your payment will take a moment to complete.

Out of interest - what impression do you get when you see that message? A few folks have mentioned it and I’m wondering if we should give it a little polish :thinking:

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Out of interest @joerowe, in a hypothetical world where GPE happened automatically, would you still have the same scaling issues? Or would the same process you use for overnight payments catch it?

This was an interesting read, pretty cool to see how different demands are predicted and managed!

Yes please!! :slight_smile:

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The delay doesn’t bother me, since once the money hits my account, my Google sheet automatically updates which then triggers my ā€œSalary Sorterā€ via IFTTT with everything worked out.

In terms of the message itself, it uses the same language you use elsewhere and is clear as to what is happening. Don’t think there is anything to change personally. If the wait was longer than a few minutes then an estimated time based on the load would be useful, but in my experience it’s rare for it to take more than 1 or 2 minutes.

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First time I’ve literally been in the app at 16:00, and the first time I’ve been delayed in getting paid early haha

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ditto… normally I wouldn’t get it early or wait until I get the notification around 5/6… I was in a queue :eyes:

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The early bird catches the queue ! :hatching_chick:

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We’d still need to scale pre-emptively as we’d be automating the worst case behaviour of every single customer hitting us at exactly 4pm :sweat_smile:

We’d probably still have a rush of customers instantly doing things with their money too, so we’d need to prepare other services the same as we do now, but possibly with different traffic patterns emerging… And most likely we’d see more traffic as customers who usually forget about GPE would get that wonderful cha-ching notification and then join the herd !

That’s purely hypothetical though

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How about an automatic option for, say, any 15 minute increment from 5pm (preselected in your settings) as an alternative.

i.e. incentive for laziness is that it comes an hour later (or as scheduled) but automatically, and still before pay day - and the load is spread more?

I’d probably do that over the immediate 4pmer that I normally do

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My thoughts on the matter are well known!

TEAM AUTOMATIC GET PAID EARLY AND AUTOMATIC SALARY SORTER :joy:

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