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Update data or lose direct debits, Payments Council warns 1

Fundraising | Celina Ribeiro | 5 Dec 2011

The Payments Council has warned charities and businesses that if they do not constantly update their information, they could lose out on direct debit or credit payments.

The Council has written to 50,000 charities and other organisations which use direct debit and credit payments to warn that if they do not update their payment systems monthly, or ideally weekly, they could unwittingly cause donations to be rejected because of dated bank data. Previously the Council recommended that such data be updated only quarterly.

With the increased frequency of financial institutions and products merging, the Payments Council says that sort codes – used to identify bank accounts – have been changing increasingly regularly. Organisations often use data downloaded from their payment solutions providers to check new customer or donor details against the current list of sort codes, but if this is not regularly updated organisations might be processing new supporter details with inaccurate data, leading to automated rejection of the payment.

The importance of collecting new direct debit donor information correctly has rarely been more important to charities, which have on the whole experienced a somewhat tumultuous time for direct debit income. In September, civilsociety.co.uk reported that direct debit cancellations in August had reached the worst level for that month on record.

Hilary Plattern, director of strategy at the Payments Council, said: “If you accept automated payments from customers it is critical that the system you use to check a new customer’s sort code is correct and is kept bang up-to-date. If it isn’t and a sort code is wrongly rejected, a customer’s patience can be tested and their business can be quickly lost.”

Frontline call-centre and website staff should also have direct access to the sort code data, the Payments Council added. 

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