Bank transfer to pay money into account.

[#1]

Firstly this idea is not to get you payback transferred into your bank account.

My idea is to allow customers to transfer money into their giffgaff account from their bank account. With many banks now supporting instant or faster payments the money would be in you account very quickly.

It would work like this:
1. You sign into your online bank.
2. Set up the details of the giffgaff account (these can normally be saved so this step only needs to be done the first time).
3. Ensure your phone number is the reference of the payment so giffgaff k ow which account to allocate the payment to.
4. Select the amount to transfer.
5. Send the payment - job done money in your airtime account.

Because this costs the customer nothing and giffgaff pretty much nothing even if they have to pay, it will reduce costs and allow smaller top ups, for example £1.

Any money not correctly allocated to an account, for example it is for too small an amount, wrong phone number or close account can simply be returned to the sending account.

[#2]

Not only do I imagine this taking quite some time and money to set up, but I'm also seeing a higher security risk for a slower and unnecessary process.

[#3]

I dont think your been forward thinking ... The day will come when u dont use a credit card and mobile transfers by apps will become the norm .... This is a chance for giffgaff to beat the big boys on easy any minimum top up from £1 surely its worth investigating ???

[#4]

@solid247 Maybe. But I'm happy with the way it is now, and if it ain't broke, I ain't gonna fix it. Plus, I don't know enough about finance to give it a kudo :/

[#5]

If you know Giffgaff's account number and sort code then payment made online or by mobile application (or even by the old fashioned asking at the bank!) will be free to you and should not incur a charge for Giffgaff if the account they have does not make charges on their income streams (some business accounts that deal with high levels of income do charge for that service) so that part may be free.

As I said in my previous post the cost implications arise after this point when that payment needs to be allocated to your account and unless this is an automated process then a cost will occur. 

The questions are:

Does Giffgaff have the systems to enable automatic allocation?

Can the automatic transfer be completed on a timely basis i.e. daily?  Any lesser than this i.e. weekly would mean that monies would take a long time to show on the individual account and may mean waiting for a long time to access monies on your account

Does Giffgaff have the staffing capacity to deal with this change from the implementation of a robust system to the operation of that system?

With regards to the payback element there will be charges involved to Giffgaff which is why they use paypal - because they don't incur a charge for using this system.  I cannot see them changing systems to a bank account system because financially it doesn't make sense for them to do so.

I think that perhaps someone from Giffgaff should advise if this is possible...

[#6]

I don't see a need for this. Most (though admittedly perhaps not quite all) bank accounts have a debit card attached, giffgaff already accepts debit cards, and  the processing is probably easier anyway. 

[#7]

Processing a debit card costs approx 25p per transaction which is covered by Giffgaff.

Payments directly into their account costs nothing - if 2000 customers use this method each month then that would be £500 that is saved in charges. 

Advantage to the customer would be the ability to pay any amount they require

Disadvantage to the customer is that monies aren't available immediately

Advantage to Giffgaff is monies saved in transaction fees

Disadvantage to Giffgaff would be if the amounts paid into their bank account cannot be automatically transferred - then a charge for doing this manually would apply

As for a need for this - there are other methods available so there is no need for it.  However there have been posts before about customers wanting to pay a smaller amount than the £10 set up by Giffgaff so there is a possible demand for it.

Question to the educators - would giffgaff consider this if the process can be automated?  Savings are there and it would quieten all those demands for those who want to pay £5 each time...

[#8]

The members have spoken and unfortunately this isn't what they're looking for right now. We love ideas so don't be disheartened, try again - we look forward to it! - http://giff.ly/fromggtoyou