Overview

Often times our customers will receive Payments Originating Overseas (POO Payments). many of them will not accept POO payments for compliance reasons, or they cannot identify the remitting account due to how they are formatted. 


Initial Steps

In such cases where the customer wishes to return the funds, CS are their first port of call. With the P or T bid provided by the customer, we can enter this into the POO Return Checker Checker Metabase query. As an example, let's use P210J9U6DK from this ticket.  

We can see the Query returns us Some payment information. Namely the FPID, Sort code and Process. 

As a scheme standard, POO payments can be returned to the remitting sort code, with eight 0s as the account number, and quoting the first 18 characters of the FPID as the reference. 
E.g. Sort code: 123456, Account number: 00000000, Ref:FPIDFPIDFPIDFPIDFP



With this information, CS can advise the customer on how to return the payment. 


Advising the customer

For most banks and most payments, we can follow the standard scheme process outlined in the note above where we return to the remitting sort code and eight 0s as account number. And so we can use the canned response "POO Payment Return" and simply add in the remitting sort code, and advise the FPID of the original payment.


The customer can return the funds to the following details as it is a POO payment: 
Sort code: 
Account number: 00000000
Reference:




There is some cases where this approach does not apply, however. If the Remitting bank is either Barclays or Starling we need to use a different canned response. This is because these banks want us to send the funds to a designated suspense account rather than to the 8 0s account number. These Canned responses are "POO - Starling" and "Barclays POO Payment Suspense Details".


Barclays:

Please return funds to the below account and confirm once funds have been sent;

Sort Code - 206877 
Account Number - 58281653 
Reference - FPID of original payment

Please confirm when funds are returned as we need to advise Barclays.


Starling:

The customer can return the funds to the following details as it is a POO payment: 
Sort code: 600001
Account number: 48700746
The payment reference should include the original payment date and FPID (or as much you can fit) in order for the receiving bank to reconcile:




Advising the banks

For the 2 mentioned banks, Barclays and Starling, We also need to notify them via email when the return is completed. For this, we have email templates set up. For Barclays the template's called "Barclays POO payment return" and for Starling it's called "POO - Starling". 


In these templates, we have to provide the original payment details of the return.


If the normal process does not work?

Sometimes the processes above may not work, this is usually due to customer error, primarily, they do not put the FPID in the reference of the return payment so check this as a first port of call. We can then advise the customer to retry with the correct ref.


If the return still does not work or it continues to be bounced back, we would follow the process for reaching out to the bank for suspense details.