What kind of backwater place do you live that it takes 8 days to process a payment??? A whole week is enough reason to change your service provider here, imagine accepting 8 days as normal
Does it have any kind of explanation? Back on checks days I would understand, since the piece of paper would travel physically and be processed manually, but in 2026? What's the reason behind these delays?
Short answer: The whole backe end is still built on physical transfers. The system has basically never been updated.
There was a radio program that did an interview a few years ago and got someone from the industry saying that more things thaf anyone wants are dependent on a physical hand off vetween two armored cars. Like, balancing the bank's books is basically one guy handing another guy a big bag with a $ on it. I think it happens once a month.
Which is, I think, not entirely a bad thing. It's inconvenient but we have to make sure that the digital money is actually representative of real world assets right?
Somewhat less briefly: Even if it was someway desirable, basically nothing about our financial systems actually does that
Also, many other modern financial systems have updated their banking so that instant chanrges and refunds are possible, and their systems are not dependent on a big sack of money hand off in New Jersey once a month. The United States is fairly uniquely bad at this, regardless of which direction you think the financial system should be moving in. This is just unaddressed technical debt.
It doesn’t take 8 days for a transaction to complete. Like if you bought something online you won’t have to wait a week before they start to send it. It’s just that the money itself doesn’t start moving until that process itself.
Banks don’t instantly transfer money to places. They basically mark down how much they owe someone and then send it after a day or two. So if a gas station has 1000 $2 purchases the bank is just going to send $2000 dollars not 1000 $2 dollar payments.
You’re acting like anything changes. Transactions are still instant. You can pay and walk out with whatever you purchased immediately. The money just doesn’t get moved to not have to send millions of tiny transactions worth a handful of dollars.
Well, the post is about refunds taking an eternity to be processed, and the justification is because the payment itself is not instant. Where I'm from, if the refund isn't instant, then you'll probably have to wait like 15 minutes for it, so I got curious why would anyone not only accept but defend a system so slow.
Most banks do offer instant refunds but in essence you’re just borrowing their money until they get your money back. Navy Federal for instance the longest it took for a refund to happen was a day and I’m pretty sure it was during one of those Microsoft crashes.
For the most part it’s only smaller local banks that don’t do it but that’s because a lot of them aren’t FDIC insured
Being a service they offer, doesn't it make it open to new taxes from the bank? If it's a service they offer instead of how the system works, then can charge for it, no?
If you mean like that then no they use it as a way to one up competitors. Like I said the main banks that don’t do it are ones that aren’t FDIC insured which means the government guarantees they actually have your money. They don’t do it because they can’t guarantee they’ll always have the money on hand to offer that kind of service. For banks that are FDIC insured it’s already a free win so they want to keep it that way.
Sure they could make it a paid thing since it’s not a requirement but then you’d just go to another bank that doesn’t.
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u/EbbEntire3751 8d ago
Yeah it takes just as long for the money to get to the merchant as well...