Finance watchdog: Big fingers + tiny mobe screen + banking = doesn't end well Companies providing mobile banking services must consider how to overcome limitations in mobile device screen sizes in order to help consumers avoid making erroneous payments, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has said. In an interim report (12-page/724KB PDF) it published as part of its ongoing review into mobile banking …
I run a small business from home, and the other day I was paying one of our suppliers (using a PC with 24 inch monitor), and instead of typing 2585.10 in the payments field, I typed 25851.00. Easy mistake to make, and I was a fraction of a second from pressing the "confirm" button.
What if I had? Why is there no "undo" button? Yes, I know it asks twice to confirm, but does anyone actually think about it - aka. sending a snotty email to "reply to all"? It only takes the "ohnosecond" to realise your mistake, so there really should be an undo/cancel button, that will work for say, 30 second after confirming a transaction.
What do you do if you make this mistake - phone the helpline and be hanging on for ages and talk to an offshore call centre, explaining the predicament? In my case it was a small supplier so I could have rung them and I'd like to think they would transfer it back, but imagine trying to get someone like BT to refund the excess amount. It could take weeks or months, which for a significant amount could bring down a small business.
"I run a small business from home, and the other day I was paying one of our suppliers (using a PC with 24 inch monitor), and instead of typing 2585.10 in the payments field, I typed 25851.00. Easy mistake to make, and I was a fraction of a second from pressing the "confirm" button."
A did something similar recently - except this wasn't on my bank account, it was on a client's.
I set up a payment on their behalf, and mis-keyed the amount, so that there was an extra digit, paying something like £11489 instead of £1149. In this case, the director of the company had to authorise the payment... and it wasn't until after he'd authorised it that he spotted the mistake and rang me!
In this case, the payment was for a few days later, so it could still be amended and authorised again - but that may vary from one bank to the next.
"In this case, the payment was for a few days later, so it could still be amended and authorised again - but that may vary from one bank to the next."
Which shows the value of NOT using the Fast Payment facility to send money immediately, and instead scheduling the payment for a day or a week ahead, as these (with my bank) are easily amended until the money goes. I shall bear this in mind when making future payments, as I'd not really considered making scheduled payments for this purpose, but it's seems a sensible idea.
Fast Payment is great for paying the odd bill, where you're either very careful, or know and trust the payee, but perhaps best avoided for anything that could be tricky to resolve if it goes wrong.
maybe just convert it to regular wording i.e. "are you sure you want to send 25 thousand [$currency] to this place?"
even after eyeballing it I can get confused I cannot remember how many times I have paid the mortgage to wrong amount but swore the numbers were in the right place the 4 or 5 times I looked and checked.
they are very accommodating however, normally will send me a letter telling me I am a dumbass...
guess they get it a lot
A synthesized voice reading out confirmations could be useful in some instances. Though I'm generally pretty good about at least performing the action of double-checking things, it's a bit like trying to find the error in a diagram or a bit of code you've been staring at for hours. It could be the most obvious and commonplace mistake, but I'm really reading what I expect to see more than what I actually see. The mistake is totally edited out at a conscious level. Since having someone else check your work isn't reasonable here, maybe presenting it to a different sense might help.
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