You're correct -- Stripe self-imposed the seven-day delay early in its development.
While we may have chosen the seven-day delay, there are still a number of real challenges in moving to a faster transfer schedule. For example, we need to make sure funds are received from our banking partners in time to transfer them to our users.
I don't see why Square can start the ball rolling the next day but you need anything near 7 days delay. I figured it was just a way to make more money.
The standard ACH process however just seems slow. Maybe I've been playing with Crytocurrency too much, but it seems in the era of sub-millisecond stock trading... we should be able to figure out how to move $100 one account to another in 5 minutes or so...
Yeah, it's pretty terrible in an e-commerce context. Get a payment, wait seven days to see if it actually gets settled. The only auth you can do up front is that the numbers look correct.
While we may have chosen the seven-day delay, there are still a number of real challenges in moving to a faster transfer schedule. For example, we need to make sure funds are received from our banking partners in time to transfer them to our users.
(I work at Stripe)