Learn the moral of this banking horror story

Transferring money to someone else's bank account by mistake is easily done, says Merryn Somerset Webb. But it's a lot harder to fix.

A few weeks ago a friend told me a banking horror story. She runs a small charity and inadvertently transferred £10,000 to the wrong account (having confused a reference number with an account number).

She called her bank, Barclays. They followed their "set procedures". This involved sending one email to the recipient bank, waiting three days, sending another and then giving up. They would do no more.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.