Bank Direct is a new service introduced by expresspay this month. It’s a fantastic service by all standards. In short, the service allows you to transfer money directly between banks eliminating the wahala of joining queues at banks to do deposits. Banks currently covered as at the time of writing are: Barclays Bank, Cal Bank, First Atlantic Bank, Ghana Commercial Bank, SG SSB, Stanbic Bank, Standard Chartered, UMB, UT Bank and Zenith Bank – 10 in total. Ecobank, ADB and GT Bank aren’t included yet – I’m told they’re in the process of adding them and more banks.

Basically, you need a Visa or MasterCard to do the transfer. It means that even if your bank is not currently listed, you can still transfer from it, but the receiver must have either Visa Card or MasterCard associated with their account number from the list of banks mentioned. And here comes my experience.

You see, ExpressPay only advertised that you can do the transfer between the banks – they didn’t add the most important part of having a Visa or MasterCard as the recipient. Maybe, they assume that every bank account has a Visa or MasterCard associated with it. “The Bank Direct process is in two parts; the sending process and receiving process. For the sending process, the sender will need to enter the recipient’s phone number and not the account number. For the receiving process, the recipient will receive an SMS notification with a link to claim funds. The link will lead to a page where the recipient enters his VISA card number to claim funds.”

In my case, I didn’t know. The account that I was transferring to doesn’t have any card associated with it. So I did the transfer where I entered my phone number and received the message. When I clicked on the link I thought it would ask me of my account details. It was then I sent a tweet to ExpressPay and they clarified it for me. Now, I’m told it would take up to 5 days for them to reverse the transfer.

I must say that this is a fantastic service and many people are giving good testimonies. I need to share this experience and info so that you can know what to expect if you want this service. ExpressPay have one of the best customer service and they’re always ready to assist you should you run into trouble.