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 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is true in USA and Canada where ACH is still a thing. Countries within SEPA have instant wire transfers.
The issue of shortening the settlement time for financial transfers (which is another way of describing OP’s inquiry)has been under discussion for many years. Playing the float , as it it is called, benefits the banks and now the credit card companies.
Even the advent of computerized money transfer systems has not served to be a sufficient impetus for change
There has been a consumer oriented set of reforms that have been proposed in various forms gong back to, as I recall the early 1980’s all of which have been successfully resisted. Elizabeth Warren has been in the forefront of advocating the changes, but institutional inertia and politics have prevented meaningful change.
That addresses Why. The way to change it lies, as it always has, at the ballot box.
It’s not a thing in many Asian countries, like China, Taiwan, India, Singapore. Pay bills 24×7, no real need to visit the bank.
Banking system in North America is archaic and it’s by design. SO many unnecessary jobs being saved.
That depends in the type of transaction, as people explained already, but in some countries there are already banking systems that support payment at any time. In Brasil, we have a national system called PIX that is like venmo, but is not a separate app it’s in your normal bank account app.
In India, all bank accounts can be linked to an unique ID. It’s called UPI. You can send money to that ID and the money gets transferred instantly.
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