[bostik]

> Living in the UK, national payments are instant, with very few exceptions.

Well, anything within the same bank is instant. There is a commonly used mechanism in business accounts called "Faster Payments" which tend to settle even across banks in the UK within 2h.

Very recently - as in, in the last 4-6 weeks - a system called "SMS" was rolled out. Despite the name, it has nothing to do with text messaging. It's a new cross-bank settlement mechanism which promises to settle the transfer in 20 minutes within UK.

The reality is that SMS transfers don't work reliably across all the banks. Our payments and customer service teams had a bad week after we enabled SMS payments. When a supposedly faster transfer takes 5-6 days and you have to chase the bank(s) about payment states, there's clearly a fault somewhere.