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Just paying my Virgin Atlantic card, payment due today.
Pops up a big warning, “Debit card payments can take up to three days to reach your account… you risk missing this payment. Missing payments have a £12 fee and can affect your credit score… etc”
Wtf?
When on earth would a debit card payment take 3 days?
Surely if I pay them today, I have paid them today?
One for the ombudsman?
I wouldn’t worry about it. I have made a few payments and the “available to spend” updates quickly (and no sign of £12 charges)
It doesn’t quite work like that; debit card payments don’t clear immediately and different merchants take different amounts of time to claim or process them. The amount of a debit card transaction will be reserved/blocked in your bank account immediately but show as pending; the system allows up to seven days. If the ‘merchant’ is a credit card provider, they will sometimes show the debit card transaction on your account immediately/quickly but for interest purposes the credit isn’t recognised until it has cleared. Hence the warning you are seeing.
If you want an immediate credit to your credit card account, you need to do a bank transfer.
Not at all.
You make the transaction today, Tuesday. Their merchant processes it and they then receive money by BACS on Thursday or Friday.
If you’re not happy with the processing schedule, you can make a Faster Payment and it will usually credit your account within a few seconds but rarely more than 2 hours.
If you need the payment to reach your credit card account today just do a direct bank transfer from your current account into the bank account listed on the credit card statement. Enter your 16 digit credit card number as the payment reference.
The “Faster payments” service in the UK will mean the credit card bank account will receive the payment within two hours.
It doesn’t matter if the credit card company actually only applies the payment tomorrow the date of receipt will be recorded as having happened today.
That’s how I pay my credit card bills. As soon as I receive my credit card statement I just set up a payment to go on the day I choose up to 30 days ahead, usually 2 working days before the due date. I just make sure the date I choose is never a Saturday or Sunday.
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