Yesterday I decided to use my online banking facility to pay my credit card bill. This all seemed to go smoothly. I went to the payment page, selected my account from a drop down list and made the payment. Later on whilst browsing through the various account screens I came across this message printed in red:

“Due to essential maintenance, if you use the Online Payment option you can only make payments by Worldpay. The drop down list should not be used.”

So which bright spark at the Halifax thought it would be a good idea to print a warning message instead of disabling the function on the web-site? Or if they could really only print a message why couldn’t they put this on the payment page? I really can’t believe that anybody is going to think that printing the words “the drop-down list should not be used” on the summary page is really going to stop people using the drop-down list on the payments page!

I now have no idea whether or not my payment went through. I tried ringing the Halifax about this but did not manage to get through to someone who had any idea what I was talking about. In the end I hung up. I tried sending an email through their online help system. Maybe they received this – but I really don’t know. I didn’t receive a confirmation message at the time and haven’t received a response. The question now is why am I not with First Direct?