Pending

Your tips and ideas
1

Would it be possible to include an option to show your balance less any pending transactions? This would give a greater reflection of money available in that account.

G

2

Hi @Grindlebeard. Which bank(s) are you using?

A couple of customers have commented on the balances we show. This is surprisingly difficult to match exactly what balance you see when you log on to your bank, because lots of banks do different things with pending transactions and we have to interpret the various different figures they give as part of their Open Banking interfaces.

As an example - Barclays apply pending transactions to the balance they show immediately and other big groups like HSBC do not. HSBC will show you the last ‘booked’ (confirmed) balance but have a section in their app where they show the pending transactions that are soon to be applied. These transactions are not applied to the balance they show.

We’ve currently made a decision to try and show a balance on a consistent basis for all banks. The decision we took is to show the booked balance but also show the transactions that are pending at that time and soon to be applied.

We are exploring if it’s possible to give different balance types for different banks - to hopefully make things more consistent with how each bank shows it’s balances.

We will also explore different ways of presenting pending transactions in future.

Thanks for your feedback on this - it’s really helpful as it helps us understand the priority of this type of change.

Paul

3

Hi @paul_k,

I bank with Lloyd’s at the moment. They will show you your balance less any pending transactions, but I see what you are saying about banks approaching this differently.

When I use other apps they have chosen to show both figures, with the less-pending amount shown smaller which seems to work. So perhaps either this or it could be a user configurable option at some point in the future?

G

4

Barclays credit card app used to include Pending then an update about 6 months ago excluded Pending. The problem with that is if you take the credit limit and deduct the amount owed, the answer doesn’t match your credit available. A lot complained and they changed it back to include Pending.

How many transactions don’t go from pending to a completed transaction? In my experience very very few so balances should always include.pending.

I also think it’s better to show the worse case scenario.