[Reason077]

Even waiting one day is pretty poor when it comes to funds transfer times, let alone three!

It's a significant burden on commerce, businesses, and individuals to be without their funds for that long. And a big win for greedy banks who boost their balance sheets and profits by holding all those "in transit" funds.

In the UK, the "Faster" payment system, introduced about 10 years ago, means that the vast majority of bank-to-bank funds transfers are completed instantly.

[stephen_g]

It'll be real-time with the New Payments Platform (NPP) being brought in this year.

BPay is only for bills and stuff - I'm sure my power company don't care that much that if I pay my bill on Friday night it doesn't clear until 9am on Monday morning... (it still counts as the bill being paid on Friday). It usually clears next day on business days anyway.

Also, the bank's balance sheets don't get a "boost" from holding payments. Deposits and other customer funds are strictly a liability to the bank (they owe them back to you), and they don't automatically get interest on them. So they don't have as much incentive as say a company does to pay invoices late to collect more interest.

[tialaramex]

What's fun is that last I looked the banks still didn't have any actual technology to support this feature. The rules they're obeying explain how the feature works for customers, but the implementation is left for them. And so their actual implementation is blind trust, settlement for the transactions happens at the old rate, hours or days later. The balance updates happen instantly for end users, but if any of the banks is engaged in fraud, that won't be detected until it's probably too late.

I expect this seems like a great cost-benefit trade, right up until a multi-billion fraud wipes out one of the banks, and then suddenly they'll be really excited about something better than "cross your fingers" as a resolution mechanic.