Chase says all money in and out goes through screening, but why won’t it tell you how long this will take?
Since moving all my banking to Chase at the end of 2025, I’ve generally not had a problem. I always liked that I could have a couple of accounts to have money set aside for bills, and that I earned cashback on my spending.
However, last month my salary didn’t arrive in my account on payday. After spending most of the day chasing Chase until it eventually arrived, I thought the problem was resolved. When it happened again for my April pay, I realised that there’s truly a benefit to having a bank with a branch nearby.
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Payment “screened”
Like most people on payday, I was expecting my salary to be paid into my account early in the morning as it usually is, so I could do my typical monthly admin.
However, when the money didn’t appear, I was a bit unsure of what steps to take. I started with our payroll department, just to confirm they had, in fact, paid me. There was no indication within the app that there was a pending payment.
Once it had been confirmed that it had left their account, I contacted Chase to ask what was going on. By now it was about midday, so the payment had been missing for five hours.
Chase’s customer service confirmed the amount with me and said that they couldn’t tell me whether the payment would be made, and that the money was in a “screening process”. Chase straight up refused to give me a timeline on the process, or any explanation of what triggers such a thing.
Chase says that the process is necessary for the bank’s and its customers’ safety.
No support for customers with held payments
Repeated conversations with Chase got me nowhere — I tried emailing, web chat and talking on the phone, and wasn’t able to reach anyone helpful all day. I asked Chase, out of curiosity, what it planned to do if the process took more than one day — after all, I had bills coming out on the 1st of the month and the end of the working day was getting closer and closer.
Chase couldn’t offer support. It won’t offer an emergency overdraft or clear a portion of the funds to help you make payments. I outright asked how Chase would prevent payments from bouncing and was told that there was nothing they could do and my only option was to “keep my lines open” and keep an eye on the app in case someone needed more information.
Every time I asked for someone to contact me back to give me an update, they’d fail to do so.
No direct communication with complaints
Eventually, I lodged a complaint. By now, my issues had stemmed from the initial problem, which was the screening of customers’ salaries, and had become a complaint about the customer service offered by the company.
Up until this event, my experience with Chase’s customer service was pretty good — a card lost in the mail was dealt with quickly, and it’s one of the easiest companies I’ve changed my name with since getting married. But in this situation, where it really mattered, Chase’s customer service let it down massively.
I was met with robotic answers from the customer service agents that simply repeated my disgruntled comments back to me — “what I’m hearing is that you’d like a timeline on the process and I really understand how frustrating it is not to have one, but all I can suggest is that you keep your lines open”. There’s only so many times I can listen to someone tell me that they really understand, but can’t do anything.
The customer service team couldn’t refer me to the complaints department — they could only log a complaint and I’d have to wait for a call back.
Refusal to put decisions in writing
Once I’d fully hit a brick wall, I had to make plans for my bills that would be paid (or rather, not be paid) the following day. I asked Chase, again, what it could do to ensure my bills could still be paid, and when I was still told there was no help, I asked for confirmation in writing that Chase was refusing support and would not prevent any of my payments from bouncing.
At the time, I was on the phone to a representative, and was told that Chase can’t email or use webchat while on the phone and that they’d do it straight afterwards — no message ever came, and over webchat, they refused.
Complaints procedure
The complaints team were more understanding, empathetic and helpful. From my understanding, the representative that I spoke to listened back to all of my calls and agreed that they could have been more supportive and knowledgeable in the circumstances, and I was paid £110 compensation the first time and £25 the second time (the second time this occurred, I asked Chase to reject the payment so I could have my salary paid into another bank account to save me the hassle).
I was assured that the experience would be different if the situation were to arise again with other customers, and that there’d be support in place for customers that it happened to. I got to test this theory, as, just a month later I was calling up with the same problem and the same concerns.
Was the customer service different the second time?
Yes — but not better. The team were more empathetic, but they all had different timelines. One told me that I’d have the funds cleared within 24 hours, while another said it’d take several days. I was offered to get a call back with an update from another, who never called back, and on webchat I was told they “don’t offer this”.
In addition, throughout the first experience, I was told that only some payments went through this screening, and it just happened to be my regular monthly salary that was impacted. However, when it happened a second time, I was told that all payments both in and out of Chase are screened. I’ve reached out to Chase to get further clarification.
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Why payments get screened
Chase, along with other UK banks, has a responsibility to know its customer, monitor accounts, verify the source and purpose of funds, as well as detect and prevent other financial harm — essentially to check for fraud.
This is laid out in the terms and conditions when you sign up to the account and is an ongoing process rather than a single check at the point the account is opened.
That means Chase can, and does, occasionally hold funds while it checks to see they are legitimate.
Once a transaction has been flagged for a check, banks have the power to not just withhold it, but completely lock down the customer’s account until they are satisfied.
The problem is that customers can be left in the lurch while this goes on, and the investigations team can be tight-lipped about where they are in the process.
What is unclear is why my regular, monthly salary payment from the same employer to the same account it’s always paid into tripped this alarm. Or what aspect of the payment led to it being screened.
Worse, while in other cases Chase has explained to customers what they need to do to get their payment unlocked, in my case I was left with no actions to take and no timeline until it was resolved.
What to do if your payment is screened
If you wake up on payday to a missing salary, the first step is definitely to contact your bank. Chase was able to tell me pretty quickly that the money was in screening, so it hadn’t gone missing, at least.
However, I found Chase to be pretty unresponsive and useless beyond this — it wasn’t worth the hassle of constantly pestering them for information. I’d be interested to hear how other people got on with other banks if it’s ever happened to you. The best suggestion I can make is to make sure you can cover your monthly bills by keeping aside an easily accessible emergency fund or borrowing money from friends and family. Failing that, you can reach out to the companies to notify them of a delay in paying your bills.
If you have a credit card payment to make, you can either just settle the minimum payment in the short term or get in touch to make a “promise to pay”. This is a commitment to clear arrears within 30 days, however this can still be reported to credit reference agencies as a late payment.
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Reaching out to everyone you’re planning on paying money to is a time-consuming process, so keep track of the time that you spend dealing with the situation and summarise it in a complaint to the bank. Chase wouldn’t uphold my complaint about the screening process, but upheld both complaints about customer service. If the process lasts longer than 24 hours and payments do begin to bounce, there’s a stronger argument.
It’s also worth having a separate bank account open that you can use, with potentially a short-term overdraft in place, such as First Direct’s £250 overdraft buffer. This can give you somewhere else to manage your money while you wait.
In addition, the second time around, when I simply asked Chase to reject the payment so I could have my employer pay the money into a different account, my employer was more than happy to accommodate — the new payment reached me before Chase had even sent the money back — sometimes, you just need to reach out and ask.
We contacted Chase’s press office for a comment, and they declined to comment.
