Want to pay your bill Friday night? Too bad, the transaction will go through Monday morning.
In 2024, why, its not like someone manually moves money.
EDIT: I am not talking about BRANCH working hours, I am talking about time it takes for transactions to go through.
EDIT 2:
I am NOT talking about send money to friends type of transactions. I’m talking about example: our company once fcked up payroll (due Friday) and they said: either the transaction will go through Saturday morning our you will have to wait till Monday. Idk if it has to do something with direct debit or smth else. (No it was not because accountant was not working weekend)
In: Technology
There really is no good reason for it beyond banks in some countries not making any effort to implement such a system. In the UK, you can send bank transfers using the faster payments service introduced decades ago, and they will arrive typically within 30 seconds no matter what time of day or if it’s a holiday etc.
In the EU transactions are instant 24/7/365. Switzerland is also changing towards instant transactions.
If I pay a bill via electronic transfer when my bank is closed, they seem to queue up the transfer and send it as a batch because I usually am told that the transfer will happen somewhere between a few minutes to a few hours after I approve it.
I think they are batching by recipient so they aren’t hammering the computers at the other end of the transaction with multiple requests. Making the security “handshakes” between banks probably takes more computer cycles than the actual transfer, so connecting once to send them a bunch of account data is the norm.
Also ‘Technology’. Most banks run their computers as batch systems that process at specific times of the day, week, month, etc. They are not ‘cloud based’ on the back end.
There is one perhaps legitimate reason to sometimes have banking hours dictate the world of electronic transactions though.
When fraudsters engage in massive hacks and untraceable stealing of funds from some large account, what they have sometimes done is waited until late on Friday afternoon when some watchdog staff may be about to leave, and there’s a Monday holiday coming up, and perpetrate their fraud. The money gets stolen, no one is around for 3 days to detect it, and they make off with the cash.
In that sense, sometimes restricting major transactions to have to happen when people are around can be a legitimate protection mechanism. Although not the concern of the day to day inconvenience that is probably meant in this thread.
This was extremely annoying back in the early 2000s when I was barely keeping my head above water financially.
My paycheck would show in my account on Friday and then I’d buy groceries and pay some bills that night. Come Monday, it would show my account as having a few bucks in it, then every transaction I made over the weekend (with a $35 NSF charge) and *then* the last transaction to come through would be my direct deposit paycheck . Which would barely (and sometimes it wouldn’t) get my account positive again.
That was Wells Fargo. I fkn hated them.
Honestly working fraud for a bank, I’m kinda happy with the way things works because *sometimes* a (usually older) victim will send a wire or ACH and we can get it cancelled before they’re actually out the money.
Imagine each transaction as a message, and each bank as a carrier. Every time you buy a cup of coffee, withdraw money, send money to a friend, that’s a message. It’d be extremely inefficient if each of those was a single message. It’d take a lot of bandwidth and clog the pipes.
So what banks/carriers do is keep a ledger of the all messages written in a given period (15m or 24hrs), and then send a single message with all the texts, and then reconcile all the pluses and minuses. That’s why it takes so long.
As for why these systems have operating hours, I’m not sure. I would imagine it would have to do with timezones and human reviewers
It was wild when I lived in Japan, the ATM at the bank even shut down during nights and weekends. And back then you paid almost everything in cash, cards were only begrudgingly accepted at a few places. But you could basically do all your banking through the cashiers at convenience stores, including all your utility bills. I definitely left myself high and dry a few weekends, and had to just scrape by even though I had money, just no access to it.
Brit here… Wait, so your online banking transfer just… Does nothing until Monday? You can’t transfer cash on weekends? How the hell do you guys buy cars or other items from each other on weekends if the money doesn’t go through until Monday?
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