On Jan 9, 2008 8:32 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Badri Natarajan wrote: > > > Not aware of a similar system in India so it should be fine. Even for > > the UK - you would also need the person's home address (as used by the > > bank), and even then there is the confirmation letter which Clarkson > probably > > ignored. > > Direct debit does exist, and I use it to pay my cellphone and some other > bills. I'd be more careful if I were you. Direct debit is letting someone reach into your wallet and take out the money - this requires a seriously high level of trust and I don't trust my phone company *that* much. When I used to work at this large unnamed_but_not_too_hard_to_find_out_if_you_know_me American bank that has the largest lockbox [1] operations in the US, the Senior VP who head the place told me he never trusted direct debit for bill payments and still mailed in his checks because he knew all about the errors possible on even the best systems. Cheeni [1] Lockbox is the technical term for a bank that will process checks sent as bill payments through mail. So when you pay your monthly AT&T bill it goes directly to a pobox that is actually a receiving station of the bank - it's more like a loading yard where mail trucks empty mail onto conveyors that sort mail according to size and robots slit the usually standard sized envelopes and puff in warm air before extracting, reading and imaging the check and then forwarding the paper check to a storage bin and the extracted data to a DB - all untouched by hand in a majority of the cases. When I first saw it it was the fanciest thing I had seen in a long time, and it still is.
