![]() ![]() Otherwise there is no point in being so quick about the update. The bank updates the balances to encourage customers to feel they have the funds to spend. but how many people either read or understand the fine print? How many bank customers understand the risk that funds could be withdrawn a few days or a week later? Answer: They don't. They're doing it because they feel hopeless about their future, not because that ACH wouldn't clear in 2 days instead of three. The vast majority of people I see complaining about transfer times are trying to put $200 into stocks when they don't even have the ability to build an emergency fund. then all my bills fall on my first paycheck of the month and all my other expenses fall on the second paycheck of the month. I came from a country with a level of poverty that Americans can't even imagine.Īnother solution is to run all possible expenses on a credit card so you can standardize everything to one predictable payment date. ![]() my father and mother raised three of us on $12,000 a year. I'm a first generation immigrant, my family came half way around the world with nothing. they still have a finite income month to month and the real problem is income inequality. If someone is living paycheck to paycheck, faster transfer times aren't the solution to their problems. It can literally take years for major changes to actually get made. From the banks perspective, it’s generally better for things to stay the same and work (even if poorly) than to make a change that has the potential to disrupt their clients, even if that change would improve things long term.Īdd on to that the cost to the bank of any upgrades…. Banking technology moves really slow, partly because anything that changes can potentially affect hundreds of millions of dollars and the people who depend on those dollars being available. As is the impending demise of Internet Explorer. The demise of Flash was a problem for us. So if bank A sends the money after the end of their day, bank B might start processing it the next morning, then take a day or two to verify the transaction is legit before giving you the money. There’s also a lot of processing that only happens once a day, usually either before banking hours start, or after they end. Some of it (like IBM i) has been getting updated, but you’re still talking about software originally from the 1980s. There is a lot of ancient hardware and software in use. I don’t have an answer to your specific question, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was at least partly related to the age of some of the technology used in banking along with the shocking amount of manual interaction involved in many transactions.Īs an example, IBM i (formerly known as AS/400) is still pretty widely used in banking. I was going to post my own reply, but this person knows more about the actual ACH side than I do, so I’ll just piggyback off of them…. But this system currently requires an even larger technical investment to support, so only the largest or most technically advanced banks have it. There is a new system, Real Time Payments (RTP) that is slowly gaining support. It failed, though, because it needed a supermajority to pass, and many small banks voted against it because they do not have the money nor the tech to actually support the upgrade. It got a majority vote in favor, including vote from the big banks. A few years ago, NACHA held a vote to upgrade ACH and make Same Day ACH the default. In the US, ACH is not controlled by the government, but rather by an organization called NACHA that is made of representatives from most banks in the US. The clearing house was operated by people on business days only. It used to be that banks would compile the days ACH transfers onto tapes once per day, and ship the tapes to the clearing house to have the transfers distributed to the banks they are meant to go to. ACH is built such that there are manual steps in the transaction process. ![]() It was built on the backs of the first computers, long before the internet allowed for instant communication. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |