I hereby Pit my electric company, house insurance company, auto insurance company, and all and sundry other agencies that make me jump through hoops to pay my bills. I should be able to put my account number Here, my debit card number There, hit Submit, and move on with my day. Instead I have to log in to an account I created, and/or verify my phone number attached to my account, and then put in this code they send me.
I get the need to protect consumers’ accounts and privacy. But here’s the thing: when it comes to paying the bill, exactly no one other than I has any interest in the process. If strangers want to pay my bills for me, they are welcome to it.
I’m really curious how that works in other places.
Here i fill in a “volmacht”, a blank cheque if you like, for every utility, insurance, telco that I use and they bill me and that automatically gets paid. As long as there is enough money in my acount it is completely painless.
In fact the majority of transactions in my account are automated.
There may well be easier ways that @HeyHomie could pay his bills. But I agree with his main point: that it seems silly to have heightened security and make you jump through hoops to send money, because God forbid some unauthorized person should hack in and pay my bills for me.
What @Thudlow_Boink said. I have no problems with bill-paying because I’ve got everything automated. But while that’s great if you can do it, I can imagine a lot of reasons why that might not work for someone.
The next best thing, that I used to do, is have checks sent from my bank account - for regular payees, once it was set up all I had to do was go to my account on line, select from a list of the people/companies I paid regularly, and say how much and on what date I wanted to have the bank send them a check. Is that an option for the OP?
But yes, the larger point of the OP holds. The entire business of conducting transactions on line, and 2FA, has gotten wildly out of control. One of the places I sign onto regularly tell ms, in big red letters, “YOUR PASSWORD MUST CONTAIN 7 LETTERS AND A SPECIAL CHARACTER.”
But then it doesn’t make me change my password, which I think meets their standard (I don’t remember because I use my fingerprint). So one way or another it is a stupid message - if my password meets their criteria, it should let me in without browbeating me. If it doesn’t, it should require me to change it.
Many of these companies in the United States encourage customers to use autopay, in which the company pulls the money out of the checking account or bills the credit card automatically. I’m not willing to let them do this, fearing that they will suck all of the money out of my account. This fear may be irrational but I would rather initiate the payment myself.
It’s not to protect your payment process. It’s to protect access to your bank account.
They started doing that to me years ago and like you I was miffed at the inconvenience. But then I realized it was another layer of safety the bank has applied to protect me.
So you have to ask yourself if you feel the time spent is worth the headache of getting your account(s) hacked. If that happens you might get the money back over time but in the meantime you will have to come up with other assets to cover your debt. That could mean cashing in some of your 401K or using high interest credit cards.
In the 1930s, when it was illegal (on pain of death) for Germans to have accounts in other countries, the Gestapo sent an agent to Zurich. He befriended tellers and other low-ranking bank employees, and started collecting information on accounts possibly held by German nationals. When he dug up a potential, he would visit the bank and try to make a deposit; the moment it was accepted, the Gestapo knew they had a live one. The account holder was arrested and tortured, and eventually the bank received a form requesting repatriation of the funds. All legal & proper.
This was an extreme example, but as @Magiver said, the object of the exercise is to prevent unauthorized nogoodniks from getting account numbers by any means. Yeah, 2FA is a pain (especially when they insist on sending a code to my phone, which I may not have with me), but it’s a minor pain compared to cleaning up a compromised account.
You would love (no sarcasm) the way I pay my property taxes. I go to the county website, put in my last name, it shows all property owned by people with my last name, I select my property, put in my bank information, and done.
Absolutely no protection from someone else paying my property taxes. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid accidentally paying any “cousin’s” property taxes.
My doctor’s bills are almost that easy, but then they aren’t. My wife gets a bill in the mail that says she owes some money, “go to this link to pay.” I go to the link. I type in the account number on the bill, it asks for a birthday, I put in my wife’s birthday, and get an error. I give up. Repeat next month with slightly more urgent language on the bill.
Finally, I tried putting in my kid’s birthday, who’s name is not mentioned on the bill anywhere, and it took it.
I jump through hoops every month to pay my bills online. I do it because I get paid on different days every month; my pay dates are determined weekly, but my bill due dates are determined monthly, and sometimes the bank pulls the money a day before the due date, sometimes it does not-- and then, sometimes when there is a holiday or weekend, it pulls the money a couple of days early. This is true even though nearly all the bills have a 5-day grace period because some customers still pay by mail. So sometimes the day the bank pulls the money is 8 days before a late fee would attach, which means it did not “need” to be paid that day, and could have waited.
I don’t have enough money to keep so much in my account to cover all my bills before payday-- any spare money I have can’t just sit someplace-- it needs to be earning interest somewhere. So I need to go pay my bills on my initiative when my paycheck comes in. I can’t let the bank just pull the money whenever it wants. And sometimes I need to wait until the last possible day.
I concur. I have had this same thought. I have accounts that are sensitive. The car payment? Not so much. There is exactly one thing they can do there, and that’s pay the bill.
I pay all regular bills by direct debit. When I set them up, I was often able to pick a payment date to avoid having too many at the start of the month.
We do also have some legal protection:
The Direct Debit Guarantee applies to all Direct Debit payments. It protects you in the rare event there’s an error in the set up or collection of your Direct Debit, for instance, if a payment is taken on the incorrect date, or it’s for the wrong amount.
Coupla weeks ago, I spent over an hour on my phone with my cell phone provider trying to get them to reactivate my account, because they had taken my money and STILL deactivated my account.
Three CSR transfers later, I’m almost in tears having confirmed, repeatedly, that my payment transaction was no longer pending, the $$ was gone from my bank, and why the was my phone still deactivated?!?
(The money went to the wrong department. It was a clusterfuck.)
It’s quite common here to hear stories of people who set up such things for their elderly parents. When the parents pass, while they are busy with other issues, the company keeps withdrawing the payments, even though the bank has been told to stop. Repeatedly. Sometimes it goes on for months and people cancel it two and three times. Then spend literally months getting those funds back. We were close to doing this for MIL, real glad we didn’t.
When the bank called and suggested it, I repeated my experience as above, the person admitted, yeah, it happens quite a lot!
The bank will have a record of where your money went and when. If Verizon or the electric company pulled more money out of your account than what’s authorized, your bank could tell you.
I’ve been using auto-debit since it first became available by my various bill-senders and I’ve never encountered an issue.
I’m pretty sure all it should take to freeze a deceased person’s bank account is the death certificate. Even automatic debits would be stopped. At least in the US.
That’s what everyone thinks, I’m certain. But I watched two different people grow furious over it happening to them. They’d get it all straightened out, and then, a month later it would go through again! Bank was always so sorry, swore it was all taken care of. Can you imagine? I’d be furious too. I was >< this close to setting it up for MIL, yikes.
You might not know - but banks don’t generally freeze joint accounts, so that could be why they weren’t frozen. Lots of elderly people add a child to the account for convenience.
I don’t understand the OP’s complaint. I simply pay all my bills through online banking. When I log into my bank, there’s a list of all the entities I do business with along with the associated account numbers. I simply enter the payment amount in the box beside each one, click “Next”, confirm with “OK”, then view a confirmation screen with all the payments listed along with reference numbers. Takes a couple of seconds. It used to take a few days for the payments to go through but now it’s always the next business day. Doesn’t it work that way everywhere?
There’s no reason for me to log in to any particular payee’s own website unless I need to find out the amount owing, but most providers send me email reminders with that information. Also, for credit cards not from my own bank, I’ll log in to look at the e-statement.
As others have said, I really don’t like autopay. I prefer to have direct control over payments.
was my phone still deactivated?!?