Digital age, technology super advancements, rocket ships, artificial intelligence, self driving electric cars. Automated everything but local bank transfers can only be processed on bank working days, why?
I understand if it’s a big amount or overseas transfer remittance etc. Why even small amounts local bank transfers take the weekends off. Shouldn’t it be automated by now.
In: Technology
A comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6p59u1/eli5_why_cant_some_electronic_bank_services_be/) explains it well (thank you to u/DarthRiven):
>I’m a banking employee, and did a stint in our financial and accounting services division, the area of the bank that handles payments to the bank. This isn’t specifically inter-customer transfers, but rather payments that the bank does to vendors or that vendors pay to the bank.
>As has been noted in other comments in the thread, before payments go through there are several controls that need to be passed. Most of these are automated (checking if the account being paid into doesn’t belong to an ISIS affiliate, seeing if someone with a $2000 salary isn’t suddenly getting a $250,000 payment, etc). However, these still need to be manually approved by at least 3 different people (in our world). This doesn’t mean that 3 different people are looking at your payment before clicking “Accept”, but more that 3 different people are looking at a list of payments with all the details listed before batch loading them to the payment structure. They’re just looking for anything that looks “out of place”; so either big payments, irregular payments or maybe something weird like someone paying themselves 1 cent from a million different bank accounts. 99.99% of the time, they don’t pick anything up because the computers have already picked up the problem, but that’s not the point.
>The point is that now one bank employee can’t just grab money from wherever and dump it into whichever account they want. Requiring 3 randomly assigned people to perform the check ON TOP of the computerize system reduces the (mostly internal) fraud rate to a level that most banks can live with. In other words, their risk and insurance are low enough because of this that they are willing to risk it happening, weed out 3 bad apples with one stone and then moving on.
>What this also ensures is that someone who hacks into the system over the weekend cannot automatically pay themselves a million bucks, go to cash machines to withdraw it all and the bank (and maybe even customers) sit with their thumbs up their assholes come Monday morning.
>tl;dr: the actual payment doesn’t require a multi-step human intervention. Preventing fraud, collusion or an inside job does.
Real time payments is only implemented in a handful of countries. US is in the next wave and working on it now. It’s slow to catch up but there’s a lot of processes in making a bank transfer instantly go through. Fraud protection, govt checks, etc.
They can and are. Maybe not in the country you live in, but you can get an Interac transfer in Canada within seconds of it being sent.
In Turkey, with this new system amounts up to 1000 Turkish Lira is processed within 20 seconds at anytime of the day or week. Other amounts needs to be processed by system that send each other messages using an intermediary service which requires human approval on most cases so they are limited to working hours minus an hour for people to close the day.
In Brazil we have three ways to transfer money between accounts, which one of them works every time you want, transfer in seconds and allow you to tie your email, phone, legal document or a random key to a bank account so you don’t need to send your bank information. Really awesome.
It isn’t that they cannot.
It’s that they aren’t.
It would involve extra checks, staffing, monitoring etc. over the weekend before the transactions would be authorised. There’s no reason they couldn’t do that, they just don’t.
I have an entirely-online bank and they still don’t. Yet they can do things like pay me earlier than any other bank (basically, as soon as they know they have the money for sure, they let you spend it, other banks often wait longer), show me the pending transactions for the Monday as soon as the Friday before, etc.
There are anti-money-laundering rules, they are checks that need to be made, there are all kinds of human-authorised parts to the process, and those don’t happen when humans aren’t working.
Because we live in an archaic system invented by someone who lived in the 1900s and nothing but aging cognitive declining men who need hospice care and their asses wiped have been at the wheel ever since.
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