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
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?
It’s because the way that bill payments are processed in the US is mostly via a method called ACH. It’s a system originally created to help the US move away from paper checks in the 1970s. Like checks, transactions are batched up and sent out to the clearing house that received and routed items to the proper banks.
A lot of this processing work is processed by the Federal Reserve and they don’t work weekends.
Because banking and clearing systems of your country are decades old. Where I live it takes second or two for last five years
It’s a US Thing.
A better interbank payment system needs to be govt or reserve Bank driven. But, that counts as govt overreaching in US. And banks will lobby to fight it because they want to charge money for transfers.
In other countries, reserve Banks are more free to allow 24×7 free digital bank transfer across banks because it makes e commerce simpler and easier. Economy grows by it.
In US, Visa, MasterCard, amex work as cartel to monopolize card payment methods. Or you have paypal or various cashapps which work as wallet. All of that will go away if you had free bank transfer system run by federal reserve Bank.
In India, for example. Reserve Bank says you need to support round the clock settlements and banks have to comply. Because reserve Bank is running the interbank network and individual banks can’t mess with reserve Bank.
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Just to be clear, vast swathes of the planet have banks and other institutions offering instant/faster payments, ranging from seconds to hours. There are no technological hurdles to overcome. It’s an easily implemented standard.
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