Banks and Building Societies

Malcolm - the solution to a wallet bursting at the seams with plastic cards is to put te on your Mobile phone and use them from that!

You can then leave the actual cards somewhere safe and go shopping with your phone wherever the relevant shop accepts 'contactless' payment.

Having used internet banking since it was first introduced, along with ATMs, I’ve found them massively more convenient than traditional banking queues and waits. They reduce the bank’s costs too, which means that I get all of my banking services for free - where else can we get such a comprehensive service for nothing? Online shopping saves far more money than I could ever earn if I’d invested that money, then drawn it out in order to pay a local store - less car wear and tear, no parking charges and better prices generally. The premium for home delivery often works out at less than driving, and it’s greener. Then there’s Amazon Prime with its next day free delivery. Card details for commonly used cards are stored on a phone App, so I no longer need to carry them when actually in a shop. And let’s not forget expert advice and reviews for online purchases, which are often a far cry from the limited knowledge of shop staff (there are exceptions to this, and we reward such expertise by paying more). I’d be very sorry to go back to the old days of queuing, delays, limited visibility, time spent and poor advice, as experienced in my earlier life.

Contactless payment may work, but whilst it is secure for the customer and the bank, it is unsafe for the retailer who accepts it. Chip and pin transactions are pretty much guaranteed to the retailer for obvious reasons, but contactless are not. If the card is stolen / lost and used fraudulently then the retailer bears the loss. The transactions are not authorised at the time of payment, but done overnight, so fraudulent payments are carried out and then claimed back by the card supplier, from the retailer. In the long term this fraud, which has increased massively since the introduction of contactless payment, can only lead to higher prices at retailers who will seek to cover their losses.

Card companies recently tried to increase the contactless amount from £30 to £50, but the government refused permission as fraud is going through the roof.

A cynic would say that people who claimed to have ‘lost’ their card, to get a whole series of transactions for free with a little bit of thought, would see this as a golden opportunity.

Where will that leave us all ??

Internet banking is quick, easy and convenient, but it also shifts much of the risk from the bank, and onto the customer.

If you type an account number wrong, receive a hacked email from your solicitor when moving or as a confused, elderly person get duped by a phone call from your ‘bank’ you as the customer lose the money, with literally no legal redress to the bank, or anyone.

Before we had this instant system, cheques could be cancelled, returned as stolen etc, and the bank took the risk. If someone stole your cheque book, the signature didn’t match and the bank was legally obliged to reimburse you, as it was they who had paid out on a stolen cheque, even if you hadn’t notified them. Now the money is generally gone within hours at the most.

It’s a brave person who keeps significant sums of money in an account with online access nowadays.

Can my mobile phone do that, redface? I thought only an Apple Iphone could do it and only a newer version of it. My wife has an Apple Iphone that is 4 years old so I think it can't do contactless. My new phone is a moto smart phone.

I personally don't think the system is any more vulnerable now than it was in the past. It's just with our 21st century means of communication we are more aware and it is difficult for the banks to cover up.

There are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself. Every other time I go online a list comes up. The most prominent is never to give any details to someone who rings and says they are from your bank. Or respond to emails that say your account has been hacked. Why would you. We no longer get the calls in the fist place, as the phone rejects anything it does not recognise.

As far as transferring money. To move anything from an account the thief  first has to get in, then be able to generate a unique code that requires use of a card.

Sort of agree about typing the account codes wrong. It's about time the banks introduced a third bit of info to be required, as the account name is apparently not verified, just the sort code and account number. A unique numeric identifier would make sense. I always transfer £1 first and get the person to verify receipt, before sending the main amount. When we sold my mums house, I checked the details I had given the solicitor several times, my wife checked them and I got the solicitor to check them.

There is Apple Pay and also Android Pay, for non iphone users, that links a card to the phone for payment at some outlets. For Apple I think it is anything after the 5s, so iPhone 6, iphone SE and above. It works OK on my SE.

I did not know either, that you could load cards on to use at any contactless facility. You would of course be restricted to only spending £30 at a time.

My wife's Apple Phone is a 5c. I don't know whether it can be upgraded to do it?

If things go wrong, I'll still receivee my pensions and monthly gift from my eldest brother. Last year when I fell and fractured my wrist, I was off work for 6 weeks and got no pay for that time from Pizza Hut, yet I still managed to keep up payments on all my debts. I was also off work for 3 weeks after my dinner2go job ended and before I started work for Pizza Hut but I still managed to get through it.

I remember it well........but now we are going well off the original topic which concerned bank branch closures.

We stay equidistant to 2 village centres where there were 3 banks in one village and 5 in the other, so a fair amount of duplication, TSB, Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale all had brances in both places, and these village centres are only about 3 miles apart.

Now Clydesdale has closed one branch, and Santander, who only have the one branch, are closing in November.  We are still well served, but I would not be surprised to see further closures, most of the branches are only busy at lunch times.