Third-Party Deposit

A third-party deposit is money arriving into a trading account from a payment instrument that is not in the account holder's name. Regulated firms generally do not accept them, and the rule is not a preference: the whole point of verifying who a client is would be lost if the funds could belong to somebody the firm has never checked. What makes the rule worth knowing before it applies is that it catches ordinary situations as often as suspicious ones — a spouse's card, a family member helping, a company paying for its director, a shared account with only one name printed on it. The firm's systems match the payer's name against the account holder, and a mismatch is normally rejected rather than queried. What happens next is the part that surprises people: the money is usually returned to where it came from rather than credited, which takes as long as the original transfer did, and a firm that noticed only after crediting may restrict the account and ask how it happened. Sending funds from an instrument in your own name is therefore not paperwork, it is the condition on which the deposit is a deposit at all.