A standing order is an instruction you give to your bank to pay a recipient a set amount at regular intervals. This can be until further notice or for a limited period of time. If you want to make any changes to the standing order or cancel it, you have to do this with your bank, not the recipients of the payments.
You set up a direct debit with the business you want to make regular payments to. They then tell your bank about the permission you’ve given them (the ‘direct debit instruction’) and collect payments from your account as and when they’re due. The instruction holder can make changes to the payments they collect under the arrangement, provided they tell you first.
If you make payments by direct debit, you’ll be protected by the direct debit guarantee. This means that if the bank or instruction holder makes a mistake with the payment of a direct debit, the bank must refund you.
A continuous payment authority (CPA) is a recurring payment that a business sets up on your card account using your debit or credit card details. As part of the set-up process, the business should get your permission (‘standing authority’) to take payments as and when they’re due. You can cancel a CPA by contacting the business receiving the payments or the card provider.
Most of the complaints we see are either that the current account provider has paid a direct debit or standing order it shouldn’t have done – or has failed to make a payment that was due.
To help us consider a complaint fairly, we’ll ask you to provide some information. We’ll make our decision about what happened using evidence provided by you, the bank and any relevant third parties. In reaching a decision, we consider:
If you asked the card provider to cancel your CPA, we’d expect to see that they:
If your complaint is about the CPA itself (for example, that you didn’t give permission for it), we’ll look at how it was set up. If the evidence shows that business didn’t get your informed agreement, then we’ll consider the CPA to be unauthorised. In this case, we’d expect your card provider to refund any payments.
We may be able to look into a complaint about the business that set up the CPA, but only if it’s a provider of financial services (for example, a ’payday’ loan provider or an insurer). Otherwise, we’ll try to direct you to someone who can help you.
See also our guidance on disputed transactions.
Talk to your bank first so that they have the chance to put things right. They need to give you their final response within 15 days for complaints about payment services. If you’re unhappy with their response, or if they don’t respond, let us know.
We’ll check whether your complaint is something we can deal with. If it is, we’ll investigate to understand what happened and what went wrong.
If we think your bank has done something wrong or treated you unfairly, we’ll ask them to put things right. This will depend on the individual circumstances and how you've been affected – it could include:
Ed asked his bank to cancel a direct debit. But they didn’t and payments continued to come out of his account.
Banking Direct Debits
Businesses can read more detailed advice on handling complaints about: