I always have to remind myself of the bank transfer situation in the US whenever I read an article complaining about it. Here in the UK, bank transfers are quick and simple (the money appears to move virtually instantly). Feel free to enlighten me to why they're so slow in the US.

"Community banks mostly don’t have programmers on staff, and are reliant on the so-called “core processors” ...

This is the largest reason why in-place upgrades to the U.S. financial system are slow. Coordinating the Faster ACH rollout took years, and the community bank lobby was loudly in favor of delaying it, to avoid disadvantaging themselves competitively versus banks with more capability to write software (and otherwise adapt operationally to the challenges same-day ACH posed)."

From the great blog Bits About Money: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/community-banking-and...

For ACH, it's the scheduling and batching that makes it slow. The transfer itself should be instant but often my bank sends it out around midnight. This is why Venmo and Zelle are so popular. You can also modify/cancel a bank transfer before it goes through, which is nice.

This is the same in Switzerland. If you request an IBAN transfer, it's never instant. The solution there for fast payments is called TWINT, which works at almost POS terminal (you take a picture of the displayed QR code).

I think BACS is similarly "slow" due to the settlement process.

The US actually has two real-time payment systems: RTP and FedNow. The number of participating banks is growing rapidly.

https://real-timepayments.com/Banks-Real-Time-Payments.html

Prior to that, you could get instant transfers but it came with a small fee because they were routed through credit card networks. The credit card networks took a fee but credit card transactions also have different guarantees and reversibility (e.g. costing the bank more in cases of fraud)

I am convinced that this is in some cases a pro-consumer behavior. A credit card company once pulled money from my bank via ACH due to the automatic payment feature I set up, but that bank account didn't have enough money in it. The bank sent me at least two emails about the situation. I finally noticed that second email and wired myself more money from a different account. The credit card company didn't notice anything wrong and didn't charge any late fees or payment returned fees. The bank didn't charge any overdraft fees or insufficient funds fees. And the wire transfer didn't have a fee due to account balance. (Needless to say, from then on I no longer juggle multiple bank accounts like that.)

The bank had an opportunity to notify me precisely because ACH is not real time. And I had an opportunity to fix it because wire transfers is almost real time (finishes in minutes not days). I appreciate it when companies pull money from my account I get days of notice but if I need to move money quickly I can do it too.

Here in Switzerland bank transfers only take place during business hours

I believe this is because Ürs has to load my silver pieces onto the donkey and drive it to the other bank.

We're pretty lucky here in Australia. Over the past decade or so, PayID has been successfully rolled out to virtually all banks, giving us free and (usually) instant money transfers - I'd say more than half of all personal payments are now done with PayID. Old-skool bank transfers are still the norm for business and administrative payments, but that's changing too, and in any case, those transfers are increasingly being executed behind the scenes over Osko (aka PayID), so they end up settling in seconds (or at least hours) instead of days.

IS IT NOW!? last time I visited (long time ago) it was BACS, and the bank clerk told me it takes one day to "properly" register they've received my fund, one day to make sure it transferred and on the third and final day, the other bank can "properly" acknowledge they've received the fund thus why it took 3 FRIGGIN DAYS. I used so much cash back then.

patio11 wrote a bit about that here: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-long-shadow-of-ch...

Isn't there a law in the UK which says it must be fast?

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