[Santander] Ensuring successful payments to legacy Alliance & Leicester accounts

Background

Due to historical banking configurations following Santander’s acquisition of Alliance & Leicester, payments to the account GB41ALEI09000000050005 require a specific reference format to be processed successfully.

What’s Changing?

To ensure your transactions are processed without issues, we are now automatically adjusting the reference format for payments sent to this account. Specifically:

• An internal account identifier used by the bank to identify account holders will be prefixed to the reference you provide.

• The reference will be truncated to a maximum of 18 characters.

This change applies only to the format of the reference when sent to the bank. Your originally supplied reference will remain visible within our system.

Impact Assessment

This update will prefix your reference with 9 characters from Santander’s internal account identification number, followed by a whitespace as the 10th character, reducing the available characters for your reference to a maximum of 8. We advise you to review your payment processes to this account to determine if this 8-character limitation will affect your ability to provide necessary payment details.

For example, if the original reference is ref-123456789 and the account identifier is xyz010101, the resulting reference sent to Santander for the payment instruction would be xyz010101 ref-1234, a total of 18 characters, including the whitespace.

When Will This Change Take Effect?

This update will become standard for all outbound payments to GB41ALEI09000000050005 starting from April 23, 2025.

Opting Out

If this change will negatively impact your processes, you have the option to opt out. Please contact us as soon as possible if you wish to disable this feature for your account.

For any questions, feel free to reach out to our support team.