Howdy!
I'm theunknowntech, a mysterious forum volunteer and evil genius who appears right when you need him.
I think the root cause might be the huge surge of Bank Holidays that have all landed at once - and these will slow things down. The Direct Debit process usually has a five day cycle to complete the entire run, but any day in the cycle that falls on a Weekend or a Bank Holiday adds an additional day because it pushes the cycle back further. As does any DD transactions that commence after the 10:30PM deadline - they get treated as being submitted the following day.
Here's a breakdown of the cycle:
- Day 1 - The request is submitted by the bank of the payee OR that of the Direct Debit processing provider (whichever one E.On uses for example)
- Day 2 - The request is "in transit" between banks
- Day 3 - The request reaches your bank and an attempt is made to collect the funds. Your bank then puts it back into the system to return to the source. This is the date that you set as your payment date
- Day 4 - The funds are "in transit" between banks
- Day 5 - The funds arrive at the payee's bank OR that of the Direct Debit processing provider - it's at this point that the payment will either clear or fail, and your account can be updated with the result
Even then, it can take several hours to do the number crunching and process the incoming funds. For example, I've sometimes known PayPal take until 2PM to confirm that a Direct Debit based payment has cleared through their system and become available in my PayPal balance, but it does eventually happen. It's actually safer that way as well.
However, the double Bank Holiday on the 27th and 28th December pushed pretty much everything back by a further two days, so it will take longer for payments to clear this week.
