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
this is how a bank work.
imagine this. you send your friend 10$. on a friday. money is removed from your account instantly, popps up on your friends account on monday.
these are 3 days where the bank can do whatever they want with your money.
given the fact there are a shitton of people on earth, imagine its not only 10$
Sadly because you live in america and america has weird system that even adults cant defend
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.
I like how they still charge fees as if they are paying humans to work 24/7 processing paper checks.
Processing. It doesn’t happen on the weekends when no ones there to make it happen.
At the end of the day the system starts processing all of the transactions. It sends out the EFTs and posts the balances to accounts and ledgers. So no one is there on Saturday or Sunday to kick off and watch the processing to make sure it goes right. That’s why any transactions that you do on the weekend aren’t posted until after processing on Monday evening.
I used to work in IT for a mid sized community bank. The IBM System I we used technically wasn’t my responsibility but somehow when something was wrong I had to fix it.
Thank you for all the answers, a serious question to all of yall who know… what happens to your livelihood when these jobs are eventually lost to automation too? What are you’re “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” options?
An extra bit of information that hasn’t appeared in other answers:
In addition to the transfers between banks being blocked in weekends by the federal Reserve, many smaller banks are unable to do internal operations in weekends. This is because they don’t actually own the software or computers that their bank runs on, but instead pay a company to do that for them. The largest company, FiServe, actually does turn their machines off for the weekend (or did in 2017 when I was working for one of their clients)
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One of the reasons CryptoCurrency was created.
The current banking and settlement processes are very antiquated.
As a software engineer specializing in payments its long overdue. Bitcoin and crypto will fix all of this nonsense.
The technology that the Federal Reserve uses is ancient. They use Doss and their system can’t even use floppy disks. Too advanced.
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