Unexpected Refunds

[nanos]

We’ve had this before:

"Delayed from" payments

Instead of changing the expiry limit for everything, would it be possible to come up with some way of letting the use re-ringfence the sums for any of these ‘refunds’? Say I’ve spend £50 on something and know I’ve received what I’ve paid for, but the merchant doesn’t collect on time so I get a ‘refund’. Knowing that I have ‘spent’ the money, I tap on the transaction in my feed, and tap on the ‘keep ringfenced/awaiting collection/still owing/call it what you will’ button, and the refund is reve…

Also, see this post a bit further up which really explains the situation very well …

@ianlyon

When you make a payment by card, you’re providing your authorisation for the merchant to take money from your account. When this authorisation is approved on our end, we move the money into a ‘hold’ account to ring-fence it from the rest of your money, typically for 7 days as most merchants come to collect it within around 2-5 days. This makes things clearer for you, since (assuming the merchant collects within 7 days) you can’t spend the same money twice.

It’s worth bearing in mind here that as far as a merchant is concerned, they never see that we’ve ring-fenced the money in your account and deducted it from the balance you can spend, and at this point, technically no money has been taken from your account - the money you see as ‘taken’ from your perspective is really just ring-fenced within your account. From the merchant’s perspective, you pay by card and authorise the payment, and some number of days later they come to collect the money owed - it’s pretty simple on their end.

If they don’t collect the money within 7 days, the ring-fenced money is automatically released and available to spend again, but at no point yet has it actually been collected by the merchant.

You’ve still given them authorisation to debit your account, though, and presumably have the goods you paid for, so you still owe them the money; this is why they can come in and (from your perspective) take the payment a second time. In reality, they’ve only ever taken the payment once - in the meantime the money was just ring-fenced by us to stop you from spending it twice, and automatically released from this status because the merchant has collected it later than they really should have.