This is the reason that banks are now offering BillPay as a 'free' service.
They are relying on the float to generate revenues. Checks that are never
cashed are an additional benefit to them.

--
Marty
"Ricardo" <Ricardo[at]discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:E787EA57-15F1-45FC-81D7-9376940F2A44[at]microsoft.com...
- quote -

I know CheckFree debited my account when they wrote the check because...they
told me that's what they did.

First I wrote MSN Bill Pay. MSNBP said the check had been correctly issued.
My bank's data showed that the check had been debited. But the recipient said
they'd never received it (they asked for a new check). To try to decipher
what had happened, I then called CheckFree. The CheckFree service person told
me that all three could be true, since they debited my account *when they
wrote the check*. MSNBP subsequently credited me the amount of the lost check.

In other words, I know this is what happened because CheckFree told me it
was their procedure to do this. It also was the only explanation that fit.

The check was a single payment to an individual, i.e. a single check.

I imagine that if you devised a way to test it (send a check to a friend and
have them hold it), you'd find that you were, in fact, debited the amount.

So, again -- MSN/CheckFree has my money while my checks are wending their
way to the payees and the payees are taking them to be cashed.

Ricardo

"johnbusc[at]hotmail.com" wrote:

- quote -

Ricardo,

You said you "learned that MSN...debits your account when they **print
the check**." How did you learn this. It is not true from my
experience.

For MSN Bill Pay, CheckFree currently handles payments in one of three
ways. Two of these involve printing a check but only one of them could
result in your funds being debited prior to posting by the payee.

If CheckFree gets multiple payment requests to the same payee for the
same payment date, they often issue a single "corporate" check (one of
their own) for the total amount of all the payments. In this
situation, the individual payment amounts are debited from the various
payers' accounts on the payment date even though the payee may have yet
to post all the multiple payments.

Could this be what's happening in your situation?

In the other case of a printed check, the draft is only for the
individual payment and will not be debited until it clears your bank.

Please note that the above is my understanding of CheckFree's system
for MSN Bill Pay. There are certainly many arrangements they have with
their other clients where the funds are debited on the payment date
regardless of how the payment is processed. This is becoming more
common and I wouldn't be surprised if this is changed for MSN Bill Pay
in the future.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
JB


Ricardo wrote:
- quote -

Something I learned a couple weeks ago after years of using MS Bill Pay /
CheckFree. I was trying to figure out why my bank showed that a check had
been cashed but the recipient said they never received the (paper) check. I
learned that MSN Bill Pay / CheckFree debits your account when they **print
the check**. So they get my money as soon as it is printed and hold it for
the float of the mailing and recipient cashing time. Several days.

Figure it out: thousands of users sending hundreds of thousands of dollars
in MSN Bill Pay/CheckFree payments. The money is sitting in someone else's
account earning interest that should be the users'. This is worth hundreds of
thousands of dollars easily. Say $10,000 for one user in one year, at say 3%
per annum. That's $300 for a year of float. Say the float is 5 days a month
or 60 days a year. That would come out to the MSN Bill Pay folks walking away
with about $50 per user per year in "stolen" interest. (Plus they're charging
the users monthly for the "service" to boot.) Big money over thousands of
users.

Where is the alternative? Is anyone up in arms about this convenient taking
of users' money?