Money has been lodged into my account

How in practice would bank A make sure a giro to a particular account number in bank B was going to the same account as the payee of the cheque lodged? Do they actually ring up the other bank to check or what. I'm just curious as to how the practicalities of it would work.

wbbs
1... It is nowadays extremely unusual for Bank A to accept a handwritten giro for an account in Bank B, and would take exceptional care to ensure that all is well before doing so.
2... If a giro is accepted in branch A of a bank for an account in branch B of that same bank, then branch A has full details of the destination account online, and will check

This situation almost certainly has no relevance to the original posting

I know, I was just curious, obviously if same bank then they could just look it up.

As to op's original problem, I did an online transfer some time ago to one of my accounts, I have couple of accounts with same bank but under different sort codes, anyway I used correct account number but wrong sort code, money ended up in someone else's account. It took me ages to get it back, receiving branch said it was up to customer who got it to give permission to transfer it back but obviously they would not give me customer's details so I had to depend on them to try and contact customer. On top of that it turned out to be a pretty much dormant account, which was good in one way as it hadn't been spent! But it made it hard to contact customer, got it back eventually.

So in theory if the person receiving the money in error does not answer there is not a lot you can do as the bank won't tell you who it is, and they cannot just go and fish the money out of their account.

That was basically it, bank said it was not their mistake so could not debit the account without customer's permission. I was very lucky I had a contact in the bank who was willing to try a little harder for me as management pretty much told me tough luck!

wbbs said:

I know, I was just curious, obviously if same bank then they could just look it up.

Click to expand...

But if it wasn't going to the same bank but a different bank they cannot check account details.