How come nothing ever goes through on like a balance sheet when online banking over the weekend? It always updates on Monday it seems like. What’s that all about?
In: Economics
Here’s an IT point of view of this (EU) – we need the weekends off to be able to upgrade/update/correct/etc our systems. The weekend is the only time we actually can freely take down our entire ”platform” so to speak, and go nuts on it. If we were operational 7days a week, that would leave us with only 4 hours a night to work with (and by 4, I mean when you hit that 4:00 you need to be done done) – and the system would have to be perfectly up and running after it immediately.
Obviously, this would be a clusterduck because you would not have time to manage any errors/ newfound production issues/ observe systems and logs/ etc. Due to regulations, its is unacceptable that we are offline during ”work time” – some systems operate on a limit with few seconds – downtime of even 1 minute is considered a super critical problem and would make the bank liable for some serious penalties. Other systems need to be brough up within hours, and some have a “one time a day” window – you miss it, you’re in the toilet.
Shutting down a system and bringing it back up is a nerve wracking thing. Even when you are doing only a restart with no changes. Any glitch will absolutely ruin your day/weekend/week/month depending on how bad it gets, with ton of business people and regulators barging down the hallway screaming in panic and asking a million questions while you are desperately trying to get things back in working order.
I know this isn’t exacly what is being asked, but figured people might like some more insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
Sadly because you live in america and america has weird system that even adults cant defend
this is how a bank work.
imagine this. you send your friend 10$. on a friday. money is removed from your account instantly, popps up on your friends account on monday.
these are 3 days where the bank can do whatever they want with your money.
given the fact there are a shitton of people on earth, imagine its not only 10$
If their server screwed up, all the IT folks had to work on standby to recover it.
Basically many task still need human to vet once awhile. In banks, money is sensitive and there are hackers would hack during these time.
It’s a general practise not to push any IT new services or major update during Friday sat sun. Also network freeze season like local holidays and international holidays.
These are major or sensitive updates generally done on Monday to Thursday.
I work in telco, so it is industrial practise as such.
But then again, once in a while, some stupid new CTO or CIO would do that to “gain” customer favour and most of the time, they would back fired and director board would say no major push on these days again and we go back to square one.
I work with it systems in a bank in Denmark. I have not worked directly with the issue but coworkers have. I cant speak for other countries as this area is highly regulated and i think there is many differences between countries.
One answer is that in “old” days there were not much computing power and you were reliant on the weekend to “batch run” alot of numbers and reports. When all systems are not doing anything it is easier to sum up accounts and stuff when there is not constantly being changes to the data. That also removed complexity in the code. Also in the weekend everything was closed so why would you make transactions ?
Fast forewared to 6-7 years ago. The Bank suddenly got the project of removing this constraint. It is not needed anymore and the customers dont want the batch days where they cant get a correct amount on their account.
The job here was to clean up in old legacy systems and remove the batch jobs that run in the weekend, to run continuesly. This was easier today with improved technology, better programmers with increased architecture understanding and ofcourse the improved processing power of todays computers.
The main issue was that this is the code incore of the bank you need to change. So every system built on top of it has to be retested and often changed. I think this last step was what took the most time, not the actual change in the “core” code.
Why have we not removed this constraint before ?.
Its a massive project and the implications are hard to foresee. Sometimes we get caught in the “this is how we always do”
Tl:DR
Because of missing computing power and for the simplicity we have used batch jobs in weekends.
With improved technology and knowledge we can remove this constraint.
It’s important to note that your question does not apply to every jurisdiction, or every bank. In the UK my online bank account updates in real time (more or less) all day, every day.
they do know right away. they have to. them taking their time is all for show. its a song and dance gimmick. gotta try and justify the fees
I work at a bank and I have the answer! There are days we call business days and non business days, this dates way back to when everything closed on Sunday for the lords day. Business days are the days of the week when businesses are open and operational, Monday- Friday, non business day are days when the businesses are not open, Saturday & Sunday. So, companies like banks, that have non business days on the weekend, are literally closed. Which means not a single person goes in on Sunday, so no one can do the math thing to your bank numbers.
The other answers are better than mine, but essentially that’s just when the bank has chosen to do their own accounting – and it’s easier when you don’t have to deal with things happening while you’re counting up, so they either get processed pre-friday night or counted the next week post-monday morning even though they happen on sat/sun
My guess for why they don’t change that, is stability. A lot of banks are running on old (sometimes obsolete) operating systems too, same reason
Because they rely on the Fed. And even though the fed isn’t a government agency, but it really is, they don’t work real normal people hours.
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