"Clive George" wrote in message
...
wrote in message
ps.com...
mike wrote:

of course, the purpose of any company is to make profit. DD makes them
more money 3 ways:
a) bills are paid on time

Seems reasonable.

b) in case of disputes they simply take the money they want

Only if the customer doesn't realise that DDs can be cancelled. The
company can't be blamed for the customer not realising this - it's part of
the documentation they have to show the customer when they sign up for the
DD, and it's pretty darn clear IMO.

c) they also can and do take an excess and use it as working capital,
so you're loaning them at 0% as well.

Slightly different point - yes, there appears to be some abuse on that
side. I'm not going to scream about it too much though - if you've got to
the stage where the interest on a hundred quid or so is important, then I
reckon you've got far more important things to be worrying about, and if
it's lots more than that, stop the DD until it gets back down to a
sensible level.

Giving a company free access to your bank account is nuts imho, you can
only blame yourself really.

Yes, doing that would be nuts. DD isn't 'free access to your bank
account' - there are in fact rather a lot of safeguards associated with
it. As such it works rather well IMO. But if you want to make your life
unnecessarily harder, I'm not going to stop you.

I'd have liked to say all that but it will be interesting to see if you get
flack instead :-)

Mary

cheers,
clive