I am with a bank where I can make a wire transfer/ direct deposit/ money transfer instantly to both the same bank as well as a different continent. While a friend of mine is with a bank that takes up to 3 days to transfer to a bank outside their country.
Why does it take such a long time when it is actually possible for it to be nearly instant?
(Talking about debit cards in this case)
In: Economics
Friend of mine who worked in. The industry for a while explained that us banks transactions are still hard on the idea of all the money and documents being brought back and forth to the banks at the end of the day, and it literally dates back to the days when it was done by horse.
Some of the transaction s still work this way, some have been modernized.
Overseas banks are saner.
Even small vanks deal with thousands of individual transactions a day. It makes sense to batch them for end of day rather than deal with each on an individual basis. Unless the customer is willing to pay extra for a live individual wire transfer fee.
A wire transfer is different than an ordinary transfer. For most transfers, including credit and debit cards, banks don’t move the money immediately, they bundle up all the transfers overnight and to work out who gets what. That’s the part that can take three days. A wire transfer is an exception to this, you pay extra and a one-off immediate transfer is made. That’s part of the reason scammer like wire transfers, the money hits their account immediately, and they can take it an run.
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