BPAY payments - belief in wrong information does make it any less wrong...
It's been a while since my last post but at least I can say I survived the madness that is End of Financial Year. It's the time of year in finance that you know is going to kick your ass no matter what plans you put in place to get through it. It doesn't matter that June 30 happens every year and that weekends happen every week; because when June 30 is on a Sunday and has been chilling out on the calendar all year with zero chance of somehow turning in to a weekday, you know that the general public has forgotten that the rest of the world isn't going to forfeit their weekend to make life easier for them. This year I did some research and went on a mission to put a common misconception about electronic payments to bed once and for all. I didn't realise at the time, but this misconception was a fact for many people and trying to change this was not unlike attempting to change a persons religion....
So, I'll try and summarise this briefly- BPAY- an electronic payment facility where people can submit online payments. If a company decides to use this system to accept payments they need to be registered as a biller and on signing the agreement must adhere to the terms of the product. A customer then logs into their online banking facility and submits a payment and it is the general understanding that it will take a few days to get to the company. We are told this repeatedly when calling customer service centres and we have to submit payments with a few days grace period to avoid late fees right?... WRONG!!! When accepting the terms to become a biller of BPAY the biller must treat payments as being received on the settlement date. The settlement date is the day the payer submits the payment if it is before the end of their banks business day or submitted after, then the following business banking day. The operative words here are "treat payment as being received". So even though it may take a couple of days for the funds to actually get to the business, it is not the the date they receive the actual funds but the settlement date.
Working in a legislated product like superannuation, the dates we use are critical and a receiving a payment in the wrong financial year could have severe tax implications. Letting our members know that they could still submit payments online on Friday would ease the pressure off our customers and reduce the lines at our front counters across Australia and for as long as we have used BPAY, we have correctly used the settlement date in our system. A simple change of how we give information based on how we actually process payments should be pretty easy to push through right?
No, not at all. First, armed with the contractual terms of the product I explained how it worked. Instead of understanding the "terms and conditions" spiel that we all revert to with our own product's 'product disclosure statement' the response from all directions was-"it's up to the clients". After explaining that our clients are not in a position to just decide whether or not they want to comply to a third party products terms and conditions, I then unveiled evidence that we actually comply and there isn't any change in what we do, just a change in what we say.
Even though people understood, were even surprised when they saw how it worked, they were still unable to accept it. It was a known fact that every business uses the date the money is received and anything else could not be guaranteed, and it didn't matter how much sense it made, it just couldn't possibly be true. They all needed specific people to confirm what they had read and what they had seen. To me, this was a realisation of human behaviour in a belief system - acceptance of something as fact just because everyone else believes it, unless the directive otherwise is given by someone they have personally given some sort of authority. Reading it isn't enough to believe, seeing it isn't enough to believe, experiencing it isn't enough to believe but one word from the right person, all of a sudden we have a fact.
What's funny is that you can ask anyone if they think outside the square, if they have common sense and whether they follow the crowd. Everyone will say they have a unique perspective, that common sense is not that common but they obviously possess it and of course they're not a sheep, they don't just follow, they make their own assessment of a situation.....
But really.... Do they?