| > So I guess this is a US thing. Is 'auto-pay' the same thing as setting up a monthly direct debit to pay either your minimum payment, a percentage, or to clear the full balance? There are a variety of things someone could mean when they say "auto-pay" in the US, including: 1. Authorizing a merchant to keep your credit card info on file and to charge that whenever they want to bill you, 2. Providing a merchant with your checking account information and authorizing them to take money from there whenever they want to bill you, 3. Many banks include a bill paying service for free with your checking account, which can be configured to receive bills electronically from many merchants, and to automatically pay them from your checking account. Many banks will allow you to choose whether to automatically pay the full bill amount, the minimum due amount, the full balance amount, or a fixed amount, and will allow you to set a maximum amount. 4. For merchants that can not send bills electronically to your bank's bill paying service, many banks will let your configure the bill paying service to send the merchant a fixed amount on a regular schedule. 5. For bills for credit cards issued by the same bank where you have your checking account, there is often an auto-pay feature to automatically pay your credit card from that checking account. This often means that there are several ways to auto-pay a given bill. For example, I could auto-pay my electric bill by method #1, method #2, or method #3. If I used method #1, I could auto-pay that credit card with #2 and maybe #3. |
You wouldn't be able to run a bank without it. Most monthly outgoings will be through such an agreement.
(I've worked on such systems. XML up the wazoo but you're expected to be able to cryptographically verify a mandate years after the fact, for auditing purposes, so the format works. And it's all API'd up.)