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Personal · Accounts

Why is my balance now negative?

Your balance may be displaying as negative for a few reasons:

  • The final cost of a transaction was more than you thought it would be: sometimes, the final charge for a product or service may be higher than the authorization amount you were first given.
  • Delayed payments: if the payment doesn't go through immediately — for example, if you pay for something somewhere with poor connectivity — your account balance may appear negative until the transaction is processed properly
  • Subscription fees: if you have an ongoing subscription, billing payments or subscription fees can make your account fall into a negative balance if you don't have enough money available when they're charged
  • Refunds that haven’t come through yet: if you’ve made a payment that caused your balance to become negative, but the same payment is due to be refunded, your balance will remain negative unless you top up or until the refund has completed

Which transaction caused a negative balance?

To find out which transaction caused your balance to go negative:

  1. Go to your transaction history
  2. Review all your recent transactions in each currency account
  3. Based on the negative balance and recent transactions, try and calculate or identify which transaction was the one to make your balance turn negative

Here’s an example:

You notice your balance is -S$50.00 . You look into your recent transactions, and see one failed transaction attempt costing S$15 today and one for S$40 yesterday, when you remember you had a balance of S$5.

Based on this information, it was the S$40 charge yesterday which caused your account to drop into a negative balance. As you only had S$5 at the time, it couldn’t cover this transaction. The later transaction of S$15 was unsuccessful because your balance was negative. To make sure no more payments fail, you’d have to top up by at least the negative balance of your account and the cost of those payments.

If you find a transaction that caused a negative balance in your account, but don’t recognise it, check out this FAQ.

If still aren’t sure what to do about your negative balance, read this FAQ for the next steps.