Revolut Direct Debits for BOI(previously KBC) setup as "one off" instead of "recurring" payment

28-06-2023 03:06PM #1

If anyone can provide helpful information to help me establish who is providing incorrect information.

I was a KBC customer, I use Revolut as my main bank, I had my KBC mortgage direct debit setup to come out of a Revolut Pocket, this worked flawlessly from the moment the recurring payment was first taken from my account and added to the Pocket, the merchant name in Revolut was: "KBC Bank Ireland Public Limited Company"

KBC moved to BOI, the merchant name in Revolut continued to be: "KBC Bank Ireland Public Limited Company" the DD continued to be taken from my Revolut Pocket without disruption.

Revolut changes customers to Irish IBAN, I have to send in a new DD mandate to BOI, this creates a new mandate, new DD payment request comes into Revolut, Merchant name has changed to: "Bank of Ireland" (I'm unsure if this merchant name change coincided with the new mandate, or would have happened regardless)

This new recurring payment is configured differently too my previous KBC recurring payment, it has it's frequency set to "One off", this setting restricts me from adding it to a Revolut Pocket.

I contact Revolut, and after I've been passed around a few teams, I'm passed to the "Product Experts" team, and they confirm that this setting is configured by the merchant(BOI), not by Revolut, that they have no way to modify this on their end, they can only cancel them.

I contact BOI, they inform me that the DD is configured as a "Recurrent" payment not a "One off", I ask, can they tell me how they provide the information to Revolut, how does the data get from BOI system into Revoluts system, unsurprisingly they are not forth coming with this information.

I've investigated on the direct debit mandate process a little, from what I can see they would have to provide Revolut with a SEPA Direct debate mandate form, something similar to what I provided them with, I assume with more details, does anyone know this flow? is its a paper system, or electronic? is there an industry wide process followed, or is this unique from merchant to merchant?

I requested a copy of the document / data sent to Revolut from BOI, BOI post me out a scan of the mandate information they had provided to me when the mandate was setup, which does indeed say "Type of Payment" "Recurrent", this however is not what I requested, I wanted a copy of the document / data forwarded to Revolut.

Two question I hope someone can help me with:

What is the process for sending a direct debit mandate from a merchant to a bank?
Is it reasonable for me to make an article 15 GDPR request to both Revolut and BOI to establish the information about me, that was passed between them, and establish who is giving me incorrect information about how this mandate was setup?

Thank in advance for anyone that takes the time to respond.

Sheep Shagger · 28-06-2023 11:00PM

I have the same problem, a DD is listed as one off on Revolut however it's now been operational for the second or third month without an issue.

Strangely the only one that actually shows is recurring is Revenue for my property tax.

29-06-2023 07:03AM

I've seen a few more threads on boards where people have had similar experiences, haven't been able to establish if it's a revolut or merchant issue, leaning towards merchant due to my experience, also have revenue setup, and several other DD with no issues...

When you say operational, I assume you mean it has been recurring, without issues, even though it's marked as "One off" ?

If I could understand the system a bit better, it's quiet possible that a merchant sends a "One off" mandate monthly to revolut, this would explain a lot...

Sheep Shagger · 02-07-2023 03:10AM

Sorry meant to say yes, some of my 'one off' payments have gone through two or three times

Strangely not all DDs are visible in my scheduled payments screen despite then going out either.

04-07-2023 03:58PM

I think I know what's going on here. When the entire Direct Debit scheme was overhauled as part of the SEPA implementation (2014), the debit instruction files that are transmitted between banks were standardised under a format called PAIN.008.001.02 XML. Every month, BOI will send one of these files to Revolut (well, they probably send hundreds a month, but for your case, only one is relevant).

One element defined in this standard is <SeqTp> (Sequence Type), which was required to have one of four possible values: FRST, RCUR, OOFF or FNAL (first, recurring, one-off or final), which said what type of instruction it was. If it was the first collection under this mandate, it was required to have a value of FRST, and then subsequent collections were required to have a value of RCUR. If the wrong value was used, e.g. if an instruction was submitted with RCUR and no FRST had ever been received, the debit would be rejected (and the same if FRST was submitted more than once).

This SeqTp requirement caused massive headaches for pretty much everyone involved. Trying to ensure that the correct value was used all the time was extremely difficult to do in practice, and debits were constantly being rejected. The European Payments Council, to their credit, recognised this and removed the requirement on recipients to validate that element. This meant that senders could effectively use any of the four values, and it wouldn't matter.

My guess is that BOI just send all their debit instructions with a <SeqTp> value of OOFF. From their perspective, there is no requirement to use anything else, all debits will get processed as expected. From Revolut's side, they receive a direct debit instruction, process it, but note that the debit is marked as a one-off and treat it as such for their internal purposes.

Neither party are doing anything "wrong" here. It's perfectly valid for BOI to send a debit with OOFF (even if it's not technically a one-off transaction), and it's perfectly valid for Revolut to use that field to decide what type of debit it is. You could work with either or both companies to see if they could change anything in their systems, but I don't think you're going to have much luck

11-07-2023 07:19AM

Thank for this detailed reply, much appreciated! this explains it, I had a feeling this was most likely what was going on.

Now with regards neither party doing anything wrong, I've specifically asked BOI was the mandate being sent to Revolut as a recurring payment, and they repeatedly told me it was, even in writing, they could have explained this process to me, but chose not to, and lied, is that doing nothing wrong?

Secondly, I have been affected by a bank change I had absolutely no control over, and I'm tied into a 10 year fixed term, this process was configured correctly by KBC, and BOI have knowingly disregarded it's impact on me.

If the facts above were not true, I'd agree with you, probably nothing I can do, but as far as I'm aware, I shouldn't be impacted in anyway, by the BOI buy out of KBC loans.

And I'd be surprised if there wasn't an aspect of GDPR being broken with my request for what data was passed to Revolut from BOI.

Anyway, this gets me a step closer to a resolution, weather it's the one I want or not, who knows 🤷‍♂️😂

Revolut Direct Debits for BOI(previously KBC) setup as "one off" instead of "recurring" payment

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