I think I am able to pay my electric bill and gas bill without going through all that - if not online, I can pay over the phone with just account numbers. . But as far as insurance companies and other bills that I have to log into the account to pay , generally speaking I can do other things in those accounts. For example I can add or delete a car , change my coverage limits , add or delete cable channels. Being able to pay without logging into the account would require them to set up a separate system. I’ve encountered that with some medical providers - I get an email that has a bill, I go to my account to see the bill and then I have to go somewhere else to pay the bill.
BUT - I can also jump through just one hoop . I can log in to my account on my banks website, go to " Pay bills" , find the electric company, enter the electric company account number, amount of payment and the day I want it paid. And then do the same for the gas company and the homeowners insurance and the car insurance . And I I can set up autopay from the bank’s side for those bills that are the same amount every month.
Major banks have the system you describe. Minor banks and many credit unions do not.
Some vendors can accept electronic payments from those major banks on behalf of their mutual customers. Other surprisingly major vendors cannot accept electronic payments from banks on behalf of customers. For those kinds of very common vendors, when the bank customer clicks [send] on e.g. a $300 payment to some e.g. credit card, the bank cannot transmit it electronically.
So instead the bank prints a paper check, puts it in an envelope, puts postage on it, then snail mails it to the address they hope corresponds to that creditor. And hope USPS doesn’t lose it. And hope the creditor’s paper-shuffling system doesn’t lose it or mis-credit it.
Meanwhile the bank customer has to guess how long this will take and order their payment enough days in advance that it will almost certainly get credited before overdue. If anything goes wrong, as a matter of law, 100% of the downsides fall on the consumer with neither the bank nor the creditor having any responsibility even if they admit it was their error.
That is how we roll here in the mighty USA. Mighty as in “mightily backwards.”
I had an issue with Consumer Cellular for several months where I logged in to pay my bill and they sent me a code. Only for some reason the code wasn’t being received by the phone I was trying to pay the bill for. Very frustrating. Fortunately, they’ve sorted that out now.
Wow, thanks for the interesting info! I have just two words: freaking unbelievable!
I’m impressed by my bank’s huge searchable database that seems to contain just about every possible payee imaginable, including small businesses and municipal government tax offices. When I’m adding a new payee, it also knows what the account number is supposed to look like and verifies that the format is correct, which helps avoid blunders like getting the right company but the wrong subsidiary – the account numbers are usually different. Once registered, the payees are permanently on my list.
Being senile and scatterbrained, I also like the fact that for each payee, the date and amount of the last payment are shown. It really is extremely useful to have all my accounts payable consolidated in one place.
You misunderstand the account isn’t being frozen there are other things that must still clear, but the auto payments have been ordered stopped…only then, they go through again, you go do it again, yes they’ve stopped them, they assure you. Then… next month it goes through again. That’s what pisses them off. That and the fight it takes to get the money put back into the account.
Nope, totally rational.
A couple of years ago the power co changed out the meter. They print a 13-month bar graph so you can see your last year of usage & in Sept I used as much gas as the previous Feb, basically 100 units off. I called up the utility & they looked at it, agreed, told me to ignore that bill & to wait for a new one to pay & they send someone out to adjust it. The next month it’s quite obvious that they hadn’t sent someone out so I called them again. Wash, rinse, repeat. It was either the third or fourth month that I threatened them with a regulatory complaint that they finally fixed it. Had they been able to take money from me I’m sure I would have overlooked/forgotten about it in one of those months & they would have gotten away with it.
There are also the occasional news story of someone who goes away & racks up a couple thousand dollars of roaming charges. If the cell-phone provider comes in on the right day, they get their charges satisfied but you can’t pay your rent/mortgage because you’re not short because the cell phone company sucked out so much more than normal.
I use my bank’s bill pay system. It’s free for me, just some one-time setup of a new payee but after that I just click on the payee’s name & type the $ amt & click on {Confirm}. any bigger payees are sent electronically (it’s to the bank’s advantage to do that because it’s less expensive for them as they’re doing an ACH instead of cutting & mailing a check)
Nope. The people you’re paying are not your bank, they’re abiding by NACHA rules to debit you which don’t require 2FA. Additionally, Reg E requires fairly quick investigation & provisional credit if the investigation cannot be completed within 10 business day but frequently it’s quicker than that.
This is my pet peeve about doctors and pharmacies using birthdays for billing information. I get that they focus on birthdays primarily to make sure they are dealing with the right person for prescribed drugs or for medical procedures. But they should keep that out of billing transactions, the security risk is too great.
Not to mention how, when identifying myself at a pharmacy prescription pickup window, they ask for my name, address, and birth date, which are easily heard by the person standing at the next window. I think the next time I will just hand them my driver’s license instead of saying it all out loud.
I used to use this system to pay one particular monthly utility bill. The small company doing the billing charged a fee to setup automated ACH withdrawals, so mostly out of spite, I had the bank mail them a check every month.
One month they lost my check. I got a bill that seemed too high, did a bit of investigation and found they’d never cashed last month’s check.
Talked to them, sent them the receipt showing the bank mailed the check, and they waived the fee for me to setup automatic payments.
Meh. I’m irresponsible enough that I hardly ever look at my account balance except when I’m paying a bill. Having them all be automated payments could get me in a lot of trouble.
I don’t know what’s so hard to understand here? Yes, they all contacted both bank and company but still, the bank keeps making the payment, then the customer has to fight to get the funds back. It’s automated, so even though they are assured each time that, “no, it’s been definitely stopped now!” , somehow, come next month, it once again goes through.
There is no real penalty for the bank when it happens, I think that is the problem. They are, ‘gosh, sooo sorry!’, when it happens. But it keeps happening to people.
Enough that lots of people won’t do this any more. I’m one of them.
Could it be that the utility/insurance/whatever is protecting your confidentiality?
Otherwise an adversary could learn about your electricity consumption (R U growing pot? ) or whatever.
Here in Thailand it’s easy to transfer money instantaneously: Just point your camera at a QR code and click a few buttons. To transfer more than a few $1000 I must take off my glasses, point camera at myself, smile when told to smile, blink my eyes as instructed. I’ll probably need to first get a haircut next time I want to make a large transfer via phone.
If all you meant to say was that banks and the company that was being paid could both mess up and payments might continue after they are told to stop and it could take a while to fix it, then I don’t understand what that has to do with payments being set up for a parent who has since died. That could happen if the person was still alive. The taking “months to fix” part can happen even without autopayments.
Although I have to say there’s a difference between telling the electric company/cell phone company/insurance company to stop taking automatic payments and stopping the service as @PastTense said - and if there is still service, there is still presumably a bill to be paid * so I’m not exactly sure what the big problem is. Sure, you want the autopay stopped, but the bill would still have to be paid so you aren’t out any money. You talk about months to get the funds back, but I can’t figure out what funds you are talking about getting back . I understand if you don’t know, as these apparently were not your personal experiences, but that’s part of what’s hard to understand.
* Even if I unplug everything and use no electricity, there’s still minimum service charge from the electric company just to have the service turned on.
However, I THINK that what @elbows may be referring to is auto-payments for cable TV, internet, cell phone, or possibly car insurance. Presumably, any of these should be able to be cancelled with a phone call or via the company’s website. But if the cancellation doesn’t get processed correctly, then the trouble begins.
I set up auto-payments for my parents for everything that could be paid via this method: cable/internet (Cox), cell phone (AT&T), electric, gas, auto insurance. When they sold their house and moved to the retirement community, it was a trivial exercise to cancel the electric and gas payments. After Dad died and Mom quit driving, I sold their car and easily cancelled the insurance payments. And after Mom passed, I cancelled her call phone account online, and took her cable modem and set-top box to the Cox store and cancelled her account in person.
I had zero issues with ending the automatic payments, and I’m sorry to hear that it’s been a problem for anybody.
I’m glad for the 2FA, annoying as it is. Most of the direct pay accounts I use are the whole account, meaning it isn’t just a payment vehicle (e.g. for my home/auto insurer you can see all sorts of info).
As for accounts that run on past death, notes I made that go with our will delegate work across the kids, and I’ve got detailed instructions for one son to go into our online accounts, pay any outstanding balance, and then close the accounts without any reference to me/us being dead. I’ve also got the same accessibility for my mom’s accounts. That won’t apply to every account, obviously, but it’ll ease the transition.
With all of these things, it’s simplest to think of it in terms of the vendor / creditor pulling money out of your bank, or your bank pushing the money to the vendor. Either system can be used, but they’re very different in their details and more importantly, failure modes.
Vendors much prefer pull, because then they control the timing and payments aren’t forgotten or “forgotten”. But there is no enforceable regulatory mechanism for you to order your bank to deny their attempts to pull. You would think that is a basic feature of the system, but it is not.
OTOH, if you choose push, then you are in control. Even if you have the e.g. cable TV bill set up to auto-push $X every month on the e.g. 25th, one click absolutely, positively, reliably stops that process cold.
I am also in Canada, so pay almost all my bills like this - utilities, taxes, insurance, whatever. For a couple of small businesses. like my snow plowing service, who haven’t set up a service with the banks, I use an e-transfer from my bank to pay. In either case, once it’s set up it’s just a matter of going to my bank website, logging in, selecting the applicable payment option, then selecting the payee I had added to my list and telling the bank how much to pay (and possibly when, if it’s not immediate). I can then switch to my account and see the updated balance.
IIRC the list of possible bill payees is maintained centrally through the Canadian Payments Association, the central clearing house for financial transactions, so is available to all banks. I can make my payments from my huge bank or the small credit union I also have accounts with.
Perk of a major bank then? I use the USBank app and pay 99% of my bill as wolfpup describes. Once I have the payees set up I never have to enter my account number with them again.
I get a bill via mail or email, go into the USBank app, select who I want to pay, how much I want to pay them, and the date I want them to get the payment. Currently I have setup auto loan, dentist, gas, electric, internet provider, water bill, trash, credit card, mortgage, insurance, cellular. Couldn’t be easier.
) or whatever.