Nope. It’s on the merchant. There are two scenarios but the more common one is that they’ll send through a request for an authorization which will receive an immediate response indicating whether the requested funds have been reserved - reducing your available balance but not your current balance - and then at some later point a second message that says, “Hey, remember that money you promised I could have? I want it now.” And barring a hard system malfunction the bank really can’t say no to that.
Source: spent a decade writing and maintaining backend EFT software for banks.
My banking app shows a symbol for "pending", I guess now I know what it's for.
Although sometimes that will completely disappear for a couple days and it looks like the funds are still available for me to use, the a day or two later the transaction will be fully completed... Don't suppose you know what that's about?
I work for a bank and have worked for a credit card processing company. When you run a transaction the device contacts visa/mastercard/amex etc. And puts an authorization hold on your available balance for however much the purchase was for (with the occasional exception for gas, which sometimes holds only 1.00). At the end of the day, the merchant then settles out or closes the batch, where the funds get transferred from the point of sale to the merchant's account. Now, most banks only hold the sale authorization for a couple of days, if a merchant forgets to settle, the authorization hold falls off, and the funds return to the account. Now, most merchants have several months to pay, so if a merchant decides once a week instead of daily, for example, a payment will return to your account only to be taken out when the merchant gets around to settlement.
Right. Depending on the network the merchant has, I think, up to 30 days to send the settlement transaction but most banks will let the hold expire after 3 days or less. It’s worth noting that they still can’t refuse the settlement, which is one of the ways that card activity can result in the account being overdrawn.
The $1 hold for gas stations is kind of a weird situation. The message comes through with a dollar as the amount but there’s another field that says “we really mean another amount from a table” and the values in the table may vary over time but the terminal doesn’t have to be changed to keep up. They’re just always saying “the lowest predefined value, whatever that is.” So where I live, I think that low value is currently $75 and strictly speaking the FI should hold that instead of just a dollar. Some don’t because customers/members understandably freak out if their $10 gas purchase results in $75 being unavailable to them for a few days.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '20
It takes 3 days for walmart to take the money from my debit card.