Today, I got bills for my driver’s licence and car registration. The first is due by my birthday in late January and second at the end of January based on my last name. I decided the time had come to figure out how to pay a bill online. So I set up an account with my bank and chose the pay bill option. When I went there are chose the account I wished to pay from, a window opened and two lines were already filled (save for the amounts). The first line was for driver’s licence and the second for car registration. Even more astonishing, the notice numbers for the two bills, each a 15 digit number, were already filled in. How did the bank know what bills I wanted to pay and, even more, how did they know the notice numbers on the bills? I am sure they are unique numbers that identify the notice.
The only thing I can think of is that you set up autopay from the government’s website, not your bank’s website. (Which is fine and dandy - for example, I renew my own vehicle registration from the government’s website, not my bank’s website.)
If you remember entering your bank account information, the routing and account numbers, that’s definitely what happened.
~Max
I did not enter anything on the government web site. I went to the address on the notices and clicked on paying online. I didn’t so much as give my name. The web site said to go to your bank and sign in to your account. At that point, I hadn’t even decided which bank I was going to use. So I went to the bank website and set up an online account, using the number on the debit card and choosing a password. There were some questions (what year did you graduate from high school, for example) and then I clicked on bill payment and it asked which account. I chose the chequing account and two lines opened, one that said, driver’s licence and the other that said car registration, each with the correct notice number, although not the fee, already there. Scary.
Does the bank have your Social Insurance Number? If so, there could well be an exchange which allows a financial institution to retrieve information from a government database (or the reverse, allows the government to garnish/freeze your account). All in the name of efficiency, of course.
ETA: it could also be the case that the government (or a business) sends information about outstanding bills to the exchange. In which case the senders’ databases remain isolated. In theory.
Yeah, this is puzzling. I bank at Wells Fargo, which I assume is pretty mainstream. While they do have “e-bill” support, it is something I have to initiate for each payee; I have never seen a bill or proposed bill just show up.
I assume that these are recurring bills. How did you pay for them the last time they were due? Same bank? I suspect the payee may have used the information from the last payment to communicate bill information for the current payment to the bank used for the last payment.
Chances are I went with the paper bills to a branch of the same bank and had the teller pay it from the same account. As I said this is the first time I used their online banking to pay a bill. In fact, the first thing I did was start an online banking account. Once I did that, I chose bill paying and they opened a window showing the accounts I had. When I clicked on the chequing account (there were two others), a window opened up to list the payments I wanted to make and these two items appeared.
It is conceivable that my wife had paid these a year ago from her online banking account with the same bank and that chequing account is joint. But the most mysterious aspect of this was that the 15 digit* notice numbers were correctly filled out (I checked carefully). Even if the bank somehow inferred that these bills would always come in December, they should not have access to the notice numbers.
And to answer another poster above, of course, the bank has my Social Insurance Number. You can not open a bank account without it. And the motor vehicle bureau does too, I’m sure. But that amount of coordination seems, well, scary.
*The number is actually 16 digits long, but the instructions say that some banks limit it to 15, in which case, omit the last. And the number is presented in groups of 5 5 5 1, making that easy.
I aint a coder or anything like that, but it seems to me that the more likely answer is that it all happened under the dash in your browser. You said you went to the website for the bills to use their online pay portal and were further directed to choose a bank to set up online payment. Probably there was a cookie or a script of some sort that filled in the form for you once you reached a certain threshold of some sort of readiness to pay.
Again, this isn’t my bailiwick, so I don’t know for certain, just seems more likely to me.
This seems to make the most sense to me. Scenario: Your wife used her online account to pay the bills last year from the same checking account. You created an online account, and the billing information was already there because it’s associated with the checking account, not your online account.
Is the notice number identical across years? If so, or if only the last (and omitted) number changes, then the notice number is something your wife entered last year.
If your wife did not setup the bill pays last year, then I don’t know what is happening. I have some things where one financial institution can pull information from another, but that’s always something I initiate—my tax software downloading information from my brokerage account, for example—and not a mystery.
This is plausibly technically achievable, but it’s such an incredibly bad idea, security-wise, so I think it’s extremely unlikely. Like, the bank website would have to read and accept some 3rd party cookie and then use that information to autofill payee information for a transfer, which is doing like 99% of a potential scammer’s hard work for them.
My credit union offers me the option every month of having certain specific bills go directly to them (my natural gas bill, in particular), in which case they would then know the billing account number, due date, etc. I’ve never taken them up on the offer.
Indeed and I agree. I’ve seen similar though, which is why I switched banks last year.
You would think(and be correct most of the time) that financial institutions would be smart enough to not implement Very Bad Ideas, but…well it happens sometimes, granted not exactly as our esteemed Hari Seldon is describing.
Is the 16 digit code different from a previous bill? Where I am there is a central clearing house for many bills and the number it isn’t an invoice number, but a customer reference number and remains the same from bill to bill.
If so it is reasonable that if the same biller had been payed before all the details would be present. When I pay bills online this is pretty much exactly the setup. I get asked if I would like the system to remember the billing details and they go into a list of known billers.
Yeah, it’s not impossible, but I still think it’s not what’s going on here.
I have asked my wife to look up the bills from a year ago to see if the notice numbers are the same. She does most of the bill paying around here and keeps the receipts. I will report when she finds it. But I am beginning to think that this so-called notice is really the account number. You’d think they could use the licence number.
Don’t leave us hanging dude. Did you figure it out?
I might have missed this explanation above, but I know there are several ways to pay bill on line.
One way is to use the banks website and enter the payee’s data and amount, then press PAY. You need to do this each billing period.
Another way is to authorize the payee to draw the amount directly from your account. After that’s done, no action needed on your part each billing period. You just need to note the amount and date to keep your record in order.
If this has been explained above, I missed it.
Mystery (somewhat) solved. First off, the question of the notice number. The first fifteen digits of the sixteen digit number don’t change from year to year. Moreover the MVB’s own web site says that some banks accept only a 15 digit number, in which case, drop the 16th. The bank I used accepts only 15 digits, the invariable part. So that’s explained. Only thing is that my wife didn’t pay it online last year (or before that). The payment notice had a teller’s stamp on it, meaning I had gone to the bank (the same one) to pay it. Did the teller record the notice number? I suppose they must have. Still strikes me as weird.
The bank has to record the notice number in order to tell the office at the other end which account to apply the payment to.
That makes sense and undoubtedly happened. But all that was done a year ago; how did they anticipate that this year I would pay them online and have the bills teed up and ready to be paid? After all this, I find it creepy.