Totally bummed.

Time for an internet banking horror story.

With cash flow low, I decided to pay an HSBC bill with a Fifth Third account, on-line. The HSBC payment was due July 3rd. On June 28th, I initiated the payment on-line, from the Fifth Third website. The confirmation said the payment would be made the next business day, June 29th. Good to go, thinks I.

HSBC always sends e-mail notices about statements available and payments received. On Monday morning, July 2nd, I had still not gotten a notice. I logged in to the Fifth Third site to see what was going on. It said I had a new message. The new message was that the payment could not be processed because my account was inactive. I had to call customer service. So I did.

The girl there explained that the account was inactive because I had not used it in the past 12 months. It was the first I had heard of such a thing; they had not notified me at all, despite the girl's insistance that a letter would have been mailed out. However, I could correct the situation by going to the local branch and lifting the hold on the account, and the bill payment would go forward.

I went to the Wadsworth branch and explained the situation to a teller. She said I would have to make a deposit to reactivate the account. It could be as little as one dollar. (That, I think, is ridiculous, but I decided to play along and get the business taken care of). Then she also said that the activation would not be effective until the next business day. This was at 10AM, and I was depositing cash!!

Nothing to do but play along. Then I asked if the bill would be paid as soon as the account reactivated. She said that it would. I relaxed just a bit, and went off camping with H&R&J&I&J.

When I got back in on July 3rd, there was still no e-mail from HSBC. I decided that I needed to check. I logged in to Fifth Third. There was a new message. The account was active, effective July 3rd, but the payment request had been CANCELLED! I immediately tried again to make the payment. This time, it said it would not be made until the next business day, July 5th.

The bill had to be paid. Thursday morning, July 5th, the Fifth Third website still did not even show the payment as a pending payment. By that afternoon, it went pending. The HSBC website said my payment was late, and they were assessing a $39 late fee. But that wasn't the end of it.

Looking at the HSBC account data, I found that because the payment had not been received on time, the balance transfer rate of 4.99% had been bumped up to the default of 20.5%.

HSBC has now reported that they received the payment on July 9th.

I am not a happy camper. I think Fifth Third owes me for this.