Banking

The proceedings concerned an instruction to pay a sum of money to the beneficiary by CHAPS transfer to the account number and sort code specified. Although the identity of the beneficiary was important to the claimant, the evidence was that CHAPS did not operate in such a way that the beneficiary’s name formed part of the identifier which determined the destination of the payment. The reason was a practical one; the volume of transactions conducted through CHAPS each business day meant that a process of manual checking prevented payments being accomplished within the short time scale that was the hallmark of CHAPS. There was no requirement in the CHAPS rules that the beneficiary’s name be included, and in practice CHAPS transfers were processed without reference to it. The evidence was unequivocal that the identity of the beneficiary was irrelevant to the way in which the payment was processed. It was the destination account number and sort code that mattered. The manner in which CHAPS worked was that a receiving bank