Can only pay off balance from personal account

[Luca M]

Luca M wrote:

Andrew. wrote:

This kind of thing keeps popping up, and it’s all down to legislators writing rules without taking into consideration the UK’s diverse population and historic naming conventions.

In particular it’s hitting women who choose to retain their professional name for work, but use their married family name for everything else. Suddenly they hit a “Computer Says No” when they send money from their personal account in their professional name to their Premium Bond account in their married name. There’s also the issue with Scots/Celts who might use different names from what’s on their birth certificate. Jack, Jock, John, Ian, Iain are often interchangeable.

Of course, with all the hand-wringing about company names, someone could could quite easily be sending the money from a SLP or regular sole partner account with the same name as on a personal account.

The thing is that by law, once you want to take your husband family name, you need to do so by deed poll and therefore acquire a new legal name, which should be used everywhere where such a name is required. If you want to be “known as” at work or LinkedIn, the HR system (and LinkedIn
) may allow that but they should also be able to capture your legal name.

It may not be defined as “legal” but is the one that should go on documents (passport, driving license etc)https://www.gov.uk/change-name-deed-poll, and as Bank are required to verify identity you should in turn only have bank accounts that match you documents. It may have been historically fine but in practice with the recent laws on terrorism, AML and others, you must comply with providing prof of identity to your bank, which means that whatever you decide to have on the documents needs to match your banking records (legally as to comply with current legislation) so you should not be able to have a current account different then what you can be legally identify with, simple

[davidl]

I checked with a colleague who works in a bank, she doesn’t believe this is part of AML. It appears to be a blanket letter to all cards, but I understand there has been massive pushback already.

[memesweeper]

Debit cards are still accepted? I just paid mine off with one.

[kipto]

My wife had the letter as well. We have the personal cards and I pay them via online banking from our joint account. If I am the supplementary card holder I tend to use my supplementary card as the reference. Perhaps in future I should use my wife’s card number as the reference.can’t see it being an issue.

[Harrier25]

davidl wrote:

It appears to be a blanket letter to all cards

Well clearly not because I haven’t had a letter, but then again I now have just one Amex card account with my wife and daughter as supplementary card holders and I pay the balance every month with a debit card in my name.

[PGW]

I wish they had sent me the letter earlier this month prior to them claiming not to have received a substantial payment I made from our joint account. The payment was eventually traced but only after a lot of time and anguish on my part which was an experience I’m not keen to repeat.

In future I will use the ‘pay by debit card’ option where I believe the requirement for the payment card to be in the primary account holder’s name is long standing.

• This reply was modified 54 years, 4 months ago by .

[John]

I pay my wife’s Amex with my debit cards and my Amex with my wife’s debit cards and have not received anything.

Don’t understand why you would pay by bank transfer as it seems to me there is (a very slight) increased risk of making a mistake or the payment getting held up/blocked (didn’t Rob need to go to a bank branch once after his account got frozen for paying his wife’s Lloyds card or something along those lines?)

With a debit card if you type the wrong digits it won’t work and you get instant confirmation that the money has gone.

[CarpalTravel]

John wrote:

I pay my wife’s Amex with my debit cards and my Amex with my wife’s debit cards and have not received anything.

Don’t understand why you would pay by bank transfer as it seems to me there is (a very slight) increased risk of making a mistake or the payment getting held up/blocked (didn’t Rob need to go to a bank branch once after his account got frozen for paying his wife’s Lloyds card or something along those lines?)

With a debit card if you type the wrong digits it won’t work and you get instant confirmation that the money has gone.

100% this, I am glad to see I am not the only one slightly baffled. On more than one occasion, I have miss-selected a payee from my existing list. I spotted it during confirmation as I carefully check so no drama, but is a pain/risk otherwise.

Much easier and safer to log into your Amex account and essentially pull the money (rather than a BT push) directly to your account via their system, using a debit card. Also, keeps my existing payee list shorter which I like and again, reduces the chance of error.

I’d wager that most people who do a money transfer then log out of their bank account and into their Amex, to make sure it has reached it, so it’s not like there is a big time save. Using a debit card you cannot go wrong, it therefore to me at least, is the most robust method.

[Andrew.]

Why would you go into your Amex Account when you get instant notification from both your bank app and Amex App that the funds have been remitted/received?

I first used online banking at home in 1990, over the last 32 years I can’t say I’ve ever been careless enough to send funds to the wrong beneficiary.

[CarpalTravel]

Well, well done to you. If you are confident that everyone is as diligent and nobody in the history of internet banking has ever been “careless”, nor ever will have an issue with the payment processing (even with the recent improvements), and that they all have the notifications enabled, or that their bank even indeed provides such notifications (mine doesn’t), possibly you might not.