CITIBANK GOLD Bpay?

Yes, I have a citibank gold card and regularly BPAY from it. It counts as a purchase and you earn points (like most other visa/mastercards)

 

All true.

Unfortunately Citibank don't have a facility (like all the other banks that I deal with) that allows you to future date payments.

When I called up their customer centre, I was informed that they are building this facility but don't have a launch date.

Maybe I am getting too cynical but I think that they don't care about building in this facility as they have just had a large website refresh recently and still haven't introduced this option.

 

And even worse is that when making Internet banking transfers to third party accounts, you can not leave a description.

 

Merchants using BPay specify whether they will accept payment from credit cards or only direct from bank accounts, so it will depend on the merchant.

For example, for obvious reasons, you can generally only pay your credit card balance by using BPay linked to a bank account, not another credit card.

 

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could though??! Max out 1 card this month, 55 days later pay it off with another and then repeat the process the following month. All while watching your points grow at the banks' expense!

 

I think there may have been a time when you could pull that one off,
but it's long gone now

 

Does anyone know if you can make payments to the ATO this way?

 

Citibank's been "building" that scheduled Bpay facility for at least two years now.

 

ATO doesnt take credit cards.

 

You can't pay your tax by BPay using a credit card. You can check every BPay merchant on their website BPAY - Welcome to BPAY - Making Life Easier.

 

You can now finally enter a description for funds transfers.

Hooray!

 

Strange thing is that you can schedule payments from a Cit BANK account (not Visa) to third parties - but not to other Citi accounts or to BPay.

Citi in Australia is hamstrung by the momentum of being a huge international operation with a tiny appendage called Australia. Development of systems for our tiny market would be difficult for local Citi managers to get onto the IT development radar screen.

The nice thing, I suppose, is that Citi customers can do instant bank transfers to any other Citi customer around the world because Citi has just one huge IT platform.

The downside is that systems unique to Australia like BPay take forever to develop or enhance. Citi was the last of the non-regional banks in Australia to implement BPay and way last in allowing the labelling of transfer payments.

I guess even Citi had to eventually get labelling running - too many customers were probably complaining (by marching out the door) about being able to adequately identify their payments to eBay selllers.

There's occasional press speculation about whether Citi will eventually close its retail doors in Australia. Customer numbers have not reached critcal mass due to chicken/egg, quite likely. Customers won't come until the IT is state of the art - but it's not worth Citi committing IT development funds without a customer base to underwrite the commitment.