At least where I live, if I make a transfer between my accounts (with different banks) too late on a Friday, the money won’t be available until Monday. But there are no humans involved in this process – it seems to me that could be instantaneous as far as the technology is concerned. What am I missing?
In: 1897
There are technical constraints that are ‘easy’ to solve and non technical constraints in jurisdictions that have central reserve banks that individual banks maintain settlement accounts with; there is a non technical overhead to 365 day operation in ensuring that those interbank settlement accounts remain funded and operating within regulatory limits, in boundary cases like runs or high value transactions.
So essentially, it’s both a technical issue of let’s run the programme on the weekends (easy) and a people issue of do we have the right people on call monitoring these systems 365 days a year; they’re usually pretty expensive people, and currently on the golf course on the weekend so things need to be renegotiated from their ‘bankers hours’ historic baseline.
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