Handling failed payments

Part of managing a dividend payment is dealing with payments for investors which are Retained or Returned. The status of a payment can be changed automatically by the system, or manually by you when you receive information about the result of a payment attempt from your bank.

There are a variety of reasons a payment to an investor may be Retained or Returned.

Direct Credit Payments

A direct credit payment will be Retained:

• if an investor has either malformed or no bank details in the system on Payment date and your payment has been set up to disallow cheques their payment will automatically be set to Retained.
• when a payment is attempted by your bank and fails. You can change the payees status of the payment to Payment retained - wrong bank details.
  • This will trigger an email to the investor informing them that their bank details are incorrect.
  • This will also provide a link for the investor to update their details so the payment can be reissued.
  • To update an investor’s bank details on their behalf, you can edit the investor’s details.

To reprocess failed direct credit payments:

1. Once the bank details have been updated for an investor whose direct credit payment has failed (either by you or by the investor themselves), the Payment list view will show a green Updated details label in the Status column. Click one of the links to go to the payment detail view and click on the Direct Credit number to view the Direct Credit list of payees. Once in the Direct Credit list you can see a green label under the payee's name that says 'Updated bank details'.
2. Go back to the payment details and click on Download .aba file to download a new ABA file containing only the payments to retry, and then upload the ABA file to your bank.
3. Once you have confirmed ABA file upload, click on the blue number next to Direct credit to go to the Direct credit detail view. You can see the payment status for the retained payments has been changed to Paid.
4. You can now click Send unsent statements and mark as sent from the Direct credit detail view, which will create a new batch of dividend statements.

Cheque Payments

A cheque payment will be Returned if:

• an investor's address details are incorrect. In this case the status for the payment can be changed to:
  • Payment retained - wrong address details, or
  • Payment retained - cheque was returned to sender.
• To update an investor’s address details on their behalf, you can edit the investor’s details.

To reprocess failed cheque payments:

1. Go to the Payment details view.
2. Click the the blue number next to Cheque to go to the Cheque detail view.
3. In the Status column next to the investor’s name, select Payment retained - cheque was returned to sender or Payment retailed - wrong address details from the dropdown menu.
4. Once the address details have been updated for an investor whose cheque payment has failed (either by you or by the investor themselves), the Payment list view will show a green Updated details label in the Status column. Click one of the links to go to the payment detail view and click on the Cheque number to view the Cheque list of payees. Once in the Cheque list you can see a green label under the payee's name that says 'Updated address details'.
5. You can now issue a new cheque to the payee and edit the Cheque number if needed and set the status to sent
6. Once the payee has presented the cheque, set the status to Presented
7. You can now Send unsent statements and mark as sent from the Cheque detail view or the Returned view, which will create a new batch of statements.

Additional Information:

To confirm which individual investor updated their bank details, the Payment details page has a small panel that shows number of investors that have payments to be made via Direct credit, Cheques and DRP.

Click the number next to the payment type to bring up the list of investors. Those investors who have updated their bank details will be highlighted with a green line to the left of the investor's name. The investor will also be labelled New in green text underneath their name.