What do you need to make a bank transfer?

If you pay the household bills or use a subscription service, you will have made a payment via BACS before.

• Payments (BACS) normally arrive within 2 hours and you can even send a payment receipt. It’s a regulated payment system run by Bacs Payment Schemes Limited (now Pay.UK) and is one of the most common ways that money is sent and received from bank to bank.
• CHAPS is a way of sending money that's guaranteed to arrive on the same day you send it. 
  
  

Before you make the transfer, you’ll need to ensure you have access to a couple of key pieces of information. These include:

• The date that you want payment to be made

• The name of the business/organisation/individual that you are paying

• The six-digit sort code

• The eight-digit account number

• A payment reference (so that the recipient knows what the payment is for)

Once you’ve got all of this information ready to go, you can begin the process of making a bank transfer:

1.  Visit your regular bank or contact your bansk and give them the details. 
2. Initiate the payment for your order online in your bank online or in your bank app, where you can do it day and night, 365 days per year. 

Aren’t bank transfers instant?

In most cases, yes, bank transfer times are instantaneous. However, banks will occasionally hold onto your funds for several days. There are a wide range of reasons that this could be the case, but it’s most likely to happen to anomalous or especially large transactions. So, if you’ve made a transfer that’s noticeably larger than the amounts you usually transfer, it’s no reason to panic. In most cases, the bank is simply doing their due diligence. To find out exactly what’s happening to your money, give the bank a call and they should be able to explain what’s going on.