HSBC: give it up already

The BBQ Pit
1

Last summer, I did a foolish thing. I didn’t realize that I only had $90 in my checking account, because I hadn’t checked my balance in a while. I went to the grocery store and debited $45. I went to the liquor store and debited $25. I stopped at the hardware store and spent $60 with my card. So HSBC posted them thusly:

Charge: $45
Charge: $60 (overdraft)
Fee: $25
Charge: $25 (overdraft)
Fee: $25

Funny how they came in the exact order that would maximize the amount of money I owed, isn’t it? But hey, I’m the one who overdrew my account; if I don’t like it I shouldn’t do that.

Now, however, every time I have a charge to my checking account, HSBC holds on to the charge, waiting to see if another charge will come along which, if placed in the right order, will cause multiple overdraft fees to post. I just called the 1-800 number, and there is no sign of a debit to my account from Monday. It looks like it will not show up until this Tuesday, 8 days after it was made.

What the fucking fuck? Post my charges, you greedy fucking bastards.

2

Just out of curiousity, saorise, why are you still banking with Holy Shit! The British are Coming?

3

Ugh! They are not my favorites either!

We had a credit card through them. They are the friggin’ worst. They would literally call us if we were ONE friggin’ day late with our payment. When we paid on time, they would wait until it was too late to NOT get charged a late fee before they posted the payment. When they would call to dun us for payment, they would offer to take the payment over phone for a “mere” $25.00 convenience fee. No fucking way!

So, we paid those fuckers off and I’ll never have anything to do with them again. I wanted to cancel my damn card, but my hubby wants to hang onto it. If they pull any crap, I AM cancelling my card.

4

While it is legal for your bank to choose the order in which they tally the days charges to maximize the overdraft fees, I don’t believe it is legal for them to delay processing of a charge. IIRC, they are required to process any transaction which occurs prior to some time of day (Noon is what I seem to recall) on that business day. Any transaction occuring after the cut-off must be processed on the next business day. At least, that’s how I recall the banking laws in Texas. It may be different in your locale. But most likely, the merchant that accepted your debit card for payment hasn’t sent it to the bank yet. Things do get lost occasionally.

5

Banker checking in (though I don’t work for HSBC). Banks do process transactions received on a given business day before a certain time (4:00 p.m. in my employers’ case, but this can differ) on that business day. Receipt of a transaction, though, works differently than most folks might expect. When you make a purchase using your check/debit card with the credit option, an authorization is given, which supplies the merchant with a sales draft redeemable at your bank for that amount (similar to a check). The merchant then has to submit the sales draft to the bank for payment. It’s when this is done that the bank considers the transaction “received”, pays the money to the merchant, and posts the item to your account. The bank cannot control the amount of time the merchant takes to do this.

Yes, you can generally “see” the amount of the transaction deducted from your available balance from the moment you swipe the card, but this does not mean the transaction has posted to your account. When the authorization is given, the bank places a (most often) two business day hold on your account for that amount, which causes it to be deducted from your available balance. Nine times out of ten, this gives the merchant sufficient time to submit the sales draft for payment; the bank releases the hold and simultaneously posts the actual transaction, and you never notice a thing. Sometimes, though, it takes the merchant longer than two business days to submit the transaction, and the hold drops off of your account, and that amount is released back into your available balance. This can really throw you off if you don’t keep a register of your transactions, because you check your balance one day and discover you “have” $100, spend $90, and all of a sudden that $50 purchase you made four days ago posts to the account and you’re overdrawn. Lesson: keep track of your transactions.

In regard to the OP’s situation: banks update their systems on business nights, generally between the hours of midnight and 6 or 7 a.m. This is the time during which all transactions received on the previous business day will be posted to your account. Every bank of which I am aware processes transactions in the following order:

  1. Deposits
  2. Refunds/Other Credits
  3. Debits, in order from largest to smallest

That “largest to smallest” part is what bites most people in the ass. The party line for why this is done is so that larger, ostensibly more important checks (mortgage, car payment, etc.) are paid as opposed to returned for nonsufficient funds if at all possible. While it does ensure this, it also conveniently happens to generate the maximum number of fees. Is this evil? Possibly. Hell, probably. Nevertheless, all banks do it, so feel free to complain about it, but be aware that it happens.

Sorry to hear about what happened, saoirse; it looks like pretty much everything I mentioned above conspired to screw you over here. Has the bank ever refunded an overdraft fee bank to your account? If not, give them a call; courtesy refunds for infrequent overdrafts are fairly commonplace. Explain what happened (to show that you understand), admit the error was yours, and ask politely if they’ll give you a break. Unless you’ve had prior refunds or the CSR is an asshole, they should give back at least one of the fees. Good luck!

6

Australia is different in many ways to USA. But if this happened in Australia and you called your bank they would reverse at least one of those fees. If you were nice about it and it was a good bank they would reverse both fees.

7

The UK online bank smile processes transactions in exactly the reverse order.

8

I’m in Canada, and my chequing account with RBC seems to process transactions in an order favorable to me.

Looking over my statement, it looks like all transactions post in the order received (during the week). From late on Friday until Monday (transactions over the weekend post on Monday), all debits are posted from smallest to largest - if I used overdraft (I don’t) this would minimize the overdraft charges.

I’m not sure how RBC handles deposits/credits over the weekend, as my only deposits are usually payroll which is direct-deposited on the 15th or 30th/31st or, if that date falls on a weekend, the working day before that.

9

Yes, I should point out (in case it wasn’t obvious from the last two posters’ comments) that the only banks whose posting policies I’m familiar with are U.S.-based.

10

Mark me down as another pissed off HSBC customer. It’s been over 3 weeks since I initiated a wire transfer. So far, they have screwed it up 4 times. Let’s hope the fifth is a charm.

The receiving bank isn’t too happy either: HSBC won’t respond to them, AFAIK.

Naturally, the money left my account on day 1: apparently the money resides in an internal account that does not bear interest. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

11

Sorry for the seagull OP, but I was off the grid over the long weekend, and this thread really just slipped my mind.

** blinkingblinking**, I had no problem with them sticking me with fees. I wrote myself a loan at 5270% APR. It’s my job to make sure I don’t do that. They did pay out on all the debits, so they can hurt me for all the charges on my account agreement.

OtakuLoki, I keep my account because I have direct deposit and I don’t want to go two weeks with no cash, or to try and cash a paycheck at Chase, which requires an act of God and God has to have two forms of government-issued picture ID.

Speaking of which, I checked my balance last night about 11:45 pm. My paycheck goes in around 2 in the morning. None of my recent transactions had posted. This afternoon, they all had posted on June 1, even the one from last Friday afternoon.

12

Try another bank? :confused:

13

I’ve been burned a couple of times by our bank which, inconcievably, process debits before deposits. I’ve had checks bounce the same day I made a sizeable deposit.

14

I was under the impression that, in New York State, they had to post transactions in that order each day.

15

Oh yes.

But first I have to somehow, someway move the funds out.

16

I had an extemely low balance in my checking account…less than 5 dollars. (Poverty sucks). My son did a Paypal transaction that deposited a little over 5 dollars into my account and then right out again, in the space of three minutes by the timestamps on my Paypall statement. But because he did this after 5 pm, my bank processed it this way: withdrawal of $5, overdraft fee of $34, deposit the next day of $5, purchase of $1.32 (didn’t know I was overdrawn, bought a pop on the way to work), overdraft fee of $34.

As the bank explained to me, withdrawals can happen any time of day or night, but deposits only get posted if they happen before 4pm. So it doesn’t matter what order you actually do it in, they will find a way to screw you over. Fortunately the bank was nice enough to refund the two fees…but I had to wait another 24 hours for that to be deposited!

17

Did you make the deposit before the cutoff time for same-day posting? My employer’s cutoff time is 2:00 p.m., or 4:00 p.m. at our ATMs. Deposits made after the cutoff time will not cover any debits that post for that day.

If you did get the deposit in on time, is it possible there was an extended hold placed on the check? You say it was a “sizeable deposit”; occasionally larger check deposits can be held for a few days to ensure that the check clears. If this occurs, the deposit will not be used to cover any debits until the day the hold expires.

If it’s none of the above, and you’ve confirmed with your bank that they do in fact process debits before credits for the same business day, would you mind my asking who it is that you bank with? I’ll check into it before I say anything definite, but I’m relatively sure that’s not a legal practice.

kittenblue: I’d have to look at it to be certain, but I’d suspect that what you got hit with was an Unavailable Funds fee. Check card transactions do not, generally speaking, post on the same business day in which they are made, especially if they’re made in the evening hours. They do, however, have a tendency to place an immediate hold on your account as I discussed above, which deducts that amount from your available balance immediately.

If the amount of the hold takes your account into the negative (for example, if a hold of $10 is placed on an account with an avaible balance of $5), you will not receive an overdraft fee, because the item causing the negative balance has not posted to your account. But, if any other transactions post to your account while the hold is causing the balance to be negative – including any check card transactions from previous days that were on hold up to that point – you will be assessed a fee for those items.

This gets confusing, so I’ll give a scenario with two seperate outcomes: You have an account with a balance of $20. On Monday, you spend $15 with your check card at Wal-Mart. On Tuesday, at 8:00 p.m., long after the cutoff time for deposits OR debits to post for the same day, you make a check card transaction for $10 with PayPal. You check your avaible balance, and it tells you -$5, because both of your purchases are on hold. You then say “oh, shit, I’m going to overdraw”, and go deposit $10 in your account. Tuesday night, during posting, one of two things occurs.

Option 1: The Wal-Mart purchase does not post to your account. Your balance remains at $-5 until Wednesday night, when your deposit posts and is used to cover the transactions. You receive no fees.

Option 2: The Wal-Mart purchase posts to your account. In order to post the transaction, the $15 that was on hold is released back into your balance, and then debited out again and given to Wal-Mart. When this purchase posts, your account is at -$5 thanks to the PayPal hold, so you receive an Unavailable Funds fee. Your account balance is now at -$39. Wednesday night, your deposit posts, leaving your account at -$29. Then comes the posting of the $10 purchase. The $10 is released into your account, then debited back out and given to PayPal, at which point your account is at -$29, so there’s an overdraft fee. End result is that you’re $63 in the hole.

Moral of the story: know thy bank’s cutoff times for credits and debits, and know thy holds vs. posted transactions. Most of the time, it doesn’t make a difference, but when you’re down to the line, it can be the difference between $2 and -$100.

Confused enough yet? Maybe I should start an “Ask The Banker” thread…

18

Yeah, I love banking…

Checks written on my account clear the same night (money goes out). Deposits are held for 5 days (to “clear”) before the funds become available to me.

One day, I was feeling bitchy, so I called them on it.

Me: “Say, if the checks that I write clear overnight, do the checks other people write clear the same way?”

Her: “Yes.”

Me: “Okay, so if you got the money right away, why are you holding the funds?”

Her: “Um… that’s just the way we do it.”

Me: “Yes, but you can see my problem with it, right? It makes no sense to place a hold on funds that you KNOW are already in the account.”

Her: “Um… that’s just the way we do it.”

Me: “Why? Just to inconvenience the customer and foster ill will?”

Her: “Um… that’s just the way we do it.”
Lather, rinse, repeat… Morons.

It only makes it worse that I don’t use a regular “bank” or credit union- I use my brokerage house as my bank (Smith Barney).

19

Really?

In my experience, if there’s an area where Australia manages to beat the United States for sheer corporate greed and mendacity, and complete indifference to customer concerns, it’s in banking.

Have the Aussie banks improved since i left?

20

I had a really fun experience with my previous bank (First Union) a few years ago. My husband and I decided to do some Christmas shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. My husband deposited his paycheck early that week because of the holiday-on his lunch break the day before Thanksgiving, which gave the bank plenty of time to credit the deposit. Or so we thought.

We went out the day after Thanksgiving, had some lunch, did a little Christmas shopping and spent over $100. On the way home, we stopped at an ATM to make a small withdrawal to have a little cash on hand. The bank happily hands over our $20 along with a receipt with our current balance at the bottom. -250.

Thinking it was some kind of mistake, I called the bank and was told that for some odd reason they’d held my husband’s last paycheck, which they’ve never done before, and that it wouldn’t be deposited until the following Monday at midnight. I then inquired as to why the bank continued to allow us to make purchases and withdrawals all day long, unknowingly racking up our overdraft fees. I was told it was done “as a courtesy to you, the customer.” What the hell? Since when is paying the bank a crapload of overdraft fees a courtesy to the customer?

I raised a fuss about it and managed to get 3 of the overdraft charges removed but it still did some major damage to our checking account. Nice gift for Christmas. Thanks First Union. :rolleyes: