Key differences relating to payments

Certain payments have been grouped together as shown below. If a user currently has permission to approve payments up to a certain limit for one of the payment types that is being merged, their permissions, including approval limit will be carried over to the new type of payment type.

For example: if a user currently has permissions to create a Bacs single payment, this permission will be carried over so on Commercial Banking Online they can make any Bacs payments to their authorised limit.

If a user has two different payment limits for the differing payment types, the lower limit will be moved across to Commercial Banking Online.

Please review your users' permissions.

Internal transfers  will not be available on Commercial Banking Online so you will need to use an alternative payment type, for example Bacs, CHAPS or Faster Payments, inter -account transfers will be available.

Exchange rate for international payments

When you make an international payment on LloydsLink online, the exchange rate to be applied to your payment automatically applied by the Bank unless you have previously booked an exchange rate and include the FX reference number and exchange rate in the appropriate fields.

When you make an international payment on Commercial Banking Online, you have three options:

1. Manual: the exchange rate to be applied to your payment is displayed on screen for you to approve or reject.If you wish, once your accounts have been moved to Commercial Banking Online. You may change this to the automatically applied rate by contacting your client manager.
2. Pre-booked: you can use your pre-booked exchange rate. To do this you must enter the contract ID whilst making the international payment. If the contract ID and exchange rate are validated then payment will go through successfully.

International payments are processed every hour

When you make an international payment on LloydsLink online a payment advice is sent to your LloydsLink online mailbox. the payment is visible on your statement immediately.

On Commercial Banking Online, the way international payments are processed will use a different system. This means international payments are processed every hour.

As a result, there could be a delay of up to an hour for an international payment debit to be visible on your Commercial Banking Online statement. However, account balances and available funds will be updated immediately.

International draft payment charges

When you submit an international draft payment on LloydsLink online you can select who pays the charge, by selecting ‘OUR’ for your organisation to pay or ‘BEN’ for the beneficiary of the payment to pay.

On Commercial Banking Online you will need to select ‘DRAFT SHA’ for your organisation to pay the charge or DRAFT BEN’ for the beneficiary to pay.

Special instructions and information to the payee

On LloydsLink online you can add additional information when creating international payments. This information can be stored in your payment templates and can include:

• Information to the payee
• Special instructions

There are no fields for information to payees or special instructions on Commercial Banking Online, so any data in these fields, such as intermediary bank details, will not be moved.

You can request that payments are routed through a particular intermediary bank by entering this in the Intermediary Bank Field on Commercial Banking Online.

Approving inter-account transfers (IATs)

On LloydsLink online approving inter account transfers (IATs) follows a different process than approving other payment types.

On Commercial Banking Online IATs are approved in the same way as other payment types, so they will need to be approved by a panel. The amount that can be transferred is restricted to the panel approval limit.

This change may mean some users end up with access to the IAT approval panel but without the permission to create or approve an IAT.

On LloydsLink online you can restrict access so that only the user who created an IAT can view or amend it.

On Commercial Banking Online, all users with permission to create IATs will also be able to view IATs,created by other users. You can change this setting on Commercial Banking Online.

Restricted inter-account transfers

On LloydsLink online, user permissions can be restricted so that users can only view or edit an IAT they have created.

Restricting access to IATs is not available on Commercial Banking Online. Once your accounts have moved to Commercial Banking Online, users who currently only have permissions to view restricted IATs, will be able to access IATs created by other users.

This setting can be altered once you have moved to Commercial Banking Online.

Currently the SEPA Direct Debit service is available on LloydsLink online. It will not be available from Commercial Banking Online.

Same day payments to third parties with Lloyds Bank accounts can be made using Faster Payments, CHAPS, Euro or international payments, provided the payment is made within currency cut-off times.

Inter-Account transfers can be used to transfer money to another Lloyds Bank account within your account group.

Freezing a payment

On LloydsLink online, there is a freeze function which freezes a payment batch to prevent any further changes being made before it is approved.

This function is called ‘payment modification’ on Commercial Banking Online and you can set it to deny or allow individual payments or batches of payments.

Payment references

All Commercial Banking Online payment types will have two optional fields:

• debit account reference (maximum limit of 16 characters)
• beneficiary reference (maximum limit of 39 characters).

Depending on the payment type, the LloydsLink online payment reference will be automatically moved over to either ‘debit account reference’ or ‘beneficiary reference’ on Commercial Banking Online.

Character limits for the payment reference vary by payment type on LloydsLink online. This means text may be truncated if the payment reference for a particular payment type on LloydsLink online is greater than the character limit for either ‘debit account reference’ or ‘beneficiary reference’ on Commercial Banking Online.

You may find that some fields appear differently on Commercial Banking Online because if there are too many characters these will be removed. As a result, you may wish to amend your payment reference data in LloydsLink online before your accounts are moved or you can make changes once you have moved to Commercial Banking Online.

There is a guide to explain the changes that you may need to make to your beneficiaries so they are automatically moved to Commercial Banking Online.

There are three reasons why your beneficiaries may not be moved:

1. Additional information may be required
   Make sure your beneficiary contains all the information that is now needed by Commercial Banking Online.
2. Information may be in a different format
   Check that you are using the correct format for Commercial Banking Online.
3. Information may be wrong
   Commercial Banking Online will automatically check the account details of your Beneficiary. If the account doesn’t exist your template will not be moved over.

Make sure the beneficiaries meet the requirements given below.

Please ensure you verify beneficiary details before making any changes to your records. Fraudsters attempt to imitate trusted sources in order to alter these details.

A payment template on LloydsLink Online may have one or more underlying payments.

Where a payment template only has one payment, this will move to LloydsLink Online as a single payment template.

Where a payment template has more than one underlying payment, each payment will move to Commercial Banking Online as a single payment template; these payment templates will then be linked together as a payment template group.

The above applies to all payment types apart from Bacs Multiple – here the payment template and all its underlying payments will move to Commercial Banking Online as a single payment template with many underlying beneficiaries.

Payment template names

Each payment template on Commercial Banking Online will be assigned a unique template name – this will start with ‘S’ if the template is shared or ‘R’ if it’s restricted and be followed by a unique number e.g. ‘S123’.

The payment template names currently on LloydsLink Online will become your payment template description on Commercial Banking Online.

Each payment template group set up on Commercial Banking Online will be assigned a name which will comprise of ‘S’ or ‘R’ (to denote shared or restricted) followed by the template name from LloydsLink Online, e.g. ‘SMONTHLYRENTAL’. In the event of 2 identical template names, a number will be appended for uniqueness (‘SMONTLYRENTAL1’).

Which templates will be automatically moved over to Commercial Banking Online?

The following payment templates will not be automatically moved over to Commercial Banking Online:

1. International, EURO and CHAPS payment templates where the IBAN is not valid
2. International payment templates with a non-IBAN account number where the SWIFT Address/BIC Code is not valid
3. International payment templates with a non-IBAN account number where the National Clearing Code is not valid
4. Domestic payment templates where the sort code and account number quoted is not a valid UK account number
5. International Drafts
6. Unfinished payment templates
7. Payment templates where the debit account has been closed

Unpublished payment templates

Only published payment templates will be transferred to Commercial Banking Online. If you use payment templates that aren’t published and you need them to be moved over to Commercial Banking Online, publish these templates then restrict the access.

Templates should be updated and saved before creating a payment on Commercial Banking Online. Changes to payment templates cannot be made while in the process of creating a payment. The only fields that can be changed when making a payment are the amount and date.

Some optional fields on LloydsLink Online are mandatory on Commercial Banking Online. You need to edit your payment template once you’ve moved to ensure you can submit the payment. You should complete the following fields:

• Beneficiary Account Code Type
• Beneficiary Bank Name
• Beneficiary Bank Account Code Type
• Beneficiary Bank Country

Payment template permissions

Payment templates on LloydsLink Online can be prevented from being edited and/or deleted, but can still be used to create payments. These are restricted templates.

On Commercial Banking Online a payment template can either be fully restricted (not accessible at all) or unrestricted (fully accessible). If you are able to view a template, you are able to edit it.

A restricted payment on LloydsLink Online will be re-classed as ‘fully restricted’ on Commercial Banking Online. Users will not be able to view or create a payment from this template.

If a restricted payment template on LloydsLink Online has no user access, it won’t be moved to Commercial Banking Online. If you need users to have access, you’ll need to amend the permissions for this template before you move.

Restricted payment template groups

If a template group is restricted, all individual templates within the group will be set to restricted when they are moved to Commercial Banking Online.

If a restricted template is part of a template group, certain fields in the template will be visible to all users, including payment type, name, description, sort code and account number. You can edit the template description to ensure it does not include any confidential information.

Imported payments validation

On LloydsLink online an imported payment is flagged if it doesn’t pass validation. You then have the option to edit or remove the failed payment and process the rest of the file.

The failed payment can be edited, provided the user has the relevant permissions, and sent for processing separately.

Commercial Banking Online has a more thorough validation process for payments. This is to reduce the number of errors when a payment is submitted for approval.

If a payment within an imported file does not pass validation on Commercial Banking Online, the entire file is rejected. All payments must pass validation before payment processing.

Common reasons for failing validation include:

• Sort code must be represented as 6 numerical characters
• Account number must be represented as 8 numerical characters
• Beneficiary name will be a maximum of 18 alphanumeric characters (this field will not auto-truncate)
• Amount field must contain a value of at least £0.01 p (field values of £0.00 will cause the payment file to reject)

There is one exception: in a payment workflow, if the amount or date is invalid, they can be modified directly from Commercial Banking Online.

Import payment permissions

On LloydsLink online, administrators can specify, which type of payments users can import.

Commercial Banking Online does not have this distinction. Anyone who imports payments will be able to import all payment types.

Restricted import payment settings will not be moved to Commercial Banking Online, so LloydsLink online users with these settings will not be able to import payments on Commercial Banking Online.

An Administrator can enable import payment permissions for these users after you have moved to Commercial Banking Online.

Commercial Banking Online also includes a feature to set a limit on the number of payments imported by users.

Importing payments beneficiary address

On Commercial Banking Online, if the beneficiary address given on an imported payment differs from the address we have for that beneficiary the address will be automatically updated with the address held on Commercial Banking Online. 

Confidential imports

Confidential imports is a function to that restricts who can view imported payments. For a user to set a payment as confidential when imported, they must have permission to set an imported payment as confidential.

Currently it’s possible to create reminder events in the LloydsLink online calendar.

Commercial Banking Online will not have this feature so any regular payments should be added to your Outlook or other calendar to ensure you continue to receive reminders.

The approval of Bacs Multiple payments on LloydsLink online is applied at individual transaction level where as on Commercial Banking Online the approval limit is applied at Bacs Multiple batch level. For example, a batch of 10 single items of a £1,000 each would need to be approved on LloydsLink online by an approver with a limit of £1,000, whereas on CBO they would need to be authorized by an approver with a limit of £10,000.

When moving your existing panel to CBO, we will create a single Bacs limit and you should apply a Bacs batch limit to your Bacs Approval Panel as soon as you have access to CBO.

Payments on Commercial Banking Online can be set for approval by one or more users for payment types, payment limits or accounts.

For your security, we strongly recommend dual approval of all payments.

The creation of grouped payments is not available on Commercial Banking Online but individual payments can be bulk approved using the following tools:

• BULK IAT: enables you to create multiple inter-account transfer payments from the same screen
• Quick entry: allows you to create many payments and submit them together.

For your security, we recommend you review the beneficiary details of all payments (including single and batch payments) before approving them.

Referred payments

On LloydsLink online, referred payments that have not been processed by the payment cut-off times remain on the system and are processed the next day.

If a referred payment is not processed by the cut-off time on Commercial Banking Online it will be automatically rejected and will not be carried over to the next day. You will need to recreate the payment.

Need help? See how to approve a payment on Commercial Banking Online