why don't bank transactions happen on non working days?
Posted by chefshoes@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 74 comments
since every bacs, direct debit, you name it is all digital now, why do they still not work on non business days? i very much doubt someone is sat in an office pressing ok, ok, ok, ok...
this includes bank holidays, an old tradition which is now just a day off
RudeHelicopter4662@reddit
They might not need to be there to press every button, but they need to be there if the system flags a warning.
DangerousDisplay7664@reddit
The idea that fraud departments also get bank holiday’s off is laughable 😂
bmor222@reddit
They do not, worked in fraud for 3 different banks and worked bank holidays and days like Christmas at every one
Unhappy_Clue701@reddit
Probably the days when some of the highest levels of attempted fraud occur?
skend24@reddit
Well, not all of them, but it’s helpful if other departments are working on full capacity
TellMeManyStories@reddit
Banks use those days for system updates and tests.
And lots of banking infrastructure still isn't fully automated. Someone will be manually clicking "start" to process direct debits for the day, and then rerunning the job manually when it fails because some customer somehow has managed to get an emoji into their surname which breaks all the automation...
chefshoes@reddit (OP)
and if theyre clever they will never modernise it and work themselves out of a job
VolcanicBear@reddit
Nah. I've been in IT for 20 years. Have always maintained that the goal is to make ourselves redundant.
Same goes for decent bank IT depts I've consulted for.
Practical_Scar4374@reddit
You've done a great job! We've had no issues in 12 months. Here's your p45.... Day 1 after. Come baaaaaaack!
ian9outof10@reddit
Great opportunity to up your rates 😁
The COBOL programmers still making a living out of it, after all.
Unhappy_Clue701@reddit
Up your rates - hell yeah!! 😂😂😂
Unhappy_Clue701@reddit
That is pretty much what happens in IT, yes.
See also - we’ve outsourced your job to the cheapest location possible. Six months later: ‘are you available?’
And also - we’re moving everything to the cloud! Couple of years later, ‘fuck, these bills re high. Let’s do a cost comparison again’ and back it all comes…Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
imtheorangeycenter@reddit
This. I've been automating for 20+ years too, don't do an awful lot these days, but voluntary redundancy was turned down because "if it really goes wrong, we'll need you". Feels like I'm just on a retainer a lot of the time.
Kian-Tremayne@reddit
Modernising it IS my job, and has been for almost 30 years.
bacon_cake@reddit
At least when you retire we'll be banking in the modern world of 1996.
Cultural-Ambition211@reddit
Banks are desperate to automate this kind of thing.
Delicious_Bet_6336@reddit
BACS (which includes DD's) also has a 3 day cycle, which is massively dated.
Submission on day 1 - payment details, account numbers etc. Can be 7am to 10.30pm
Processing on day 2 - banks actually start doing something with the info they have. If it matches, its approved.
Settlement on day 3 - money moves.
In the current world of computer processing speed its insanely slow.
mephisdan@reddit
Then if the transaction fails it is another 2 days for it to be "reversed". So antiquated
professorcornelius@reddit
Personal customers dont usually have access to BACs though. It’s used by businesses. Businesses prefer it because it is easy to batch up many payments and automate them e.g salary payments. They are also reliable and we don’t see many issues with them. There’s no requirement to change the system because it works week for the intended user which isn’t someone holding a personal current account
ian9outof10@reddit
It doesn’t need to be any quicker, it’s batch processing - the whole point of it is for managing lots of transactions in one go, at very low cost. It’s absolutely ideal for payroll where your company uses software to determine payments, and outputs a file to arrange money movement.
Switching it to a faster system just increases cost and adds no real benefit.
SgtBukkakeMan@reddit
For businesses it isn't just a simple case of money goes from one bank to another, job done. We have to export a payment file from a different systems, then submit it through a payment provider (Paygate. Bottomline etc). BACS itself is a middleman as well. At all stages there's reconciliation and the like that needs to be done, it needs to be done in an expected batch at a certain time so we can reconcile our system.
DrunkenDitty@reddit
Because an efficeint and working bank system requores regualr maintainance, both physically and through software updates etc.
Plus your transaction will be sent through multiple verification and anti fraud stages that require computer and often human oversight amd review. Despite what people think it really isnt as simple as changing two numbers on an excel sheet for transfers.
dpwtr@reddit
"efficeint and working bank system"
I live in an EU country and the only delay I've ever had is 1 day for international transfers. Everything else is instant, even some of the international transfers.
DrunkenDitty@reddit
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Most people who have never worked in the finance industry really dont have any clue about just how advamced our industry is compared to even our closest trading partners.
The UK banking system is one of the most effcient and advanced on the planet. Its quite literally one of the only things that props our otherwise stale and anemic economy up.
Around half of all our tranfers are done on a mobile device, our system facilitates around 35 million transactions a month, with an additional 90 million csrd transactions processed per day, our financial service technology industry is one of the largest in the world, the LSE is one of the biggest on the planet, our banking regulations whilst not perfect are one of the most rebust on the planet, and we have significant amounts of online only banking options where customers need never go out their way to set foot in an office at all.
Do things go wrong? Sure, and sometimes it goes wrong for the same poor sods again and again. However take a moment to actually think about it and look up the numbers and you really begin to understand just how impressive it is that this is all handled as seemlessly as it is.
professorcornelius@reddit
Yes this post is fascinating to see how little people understand about banking & payments and how lucky we are to have the UK banking system compared to most banks abroad
dpwtr@reddit
Blah blah blah. If people are complaining about this, you're behind other countries. This isn't about things going wrong, it's certain systems being outdated.
ian9outof10@reddit
How are salaries paid in your country? I’m assuming it’s still a batch process. There’s no need for that to be fast, and the account to account system in the UK is “instant”. So there’s not really any meaningful delay for end users.
dpwtr@reddit
Depends on the company.
YetAnotherInterneter@reddit
Umm the UK is home to many of the major international banking institutions in the world and has some of the advanced financial systems available…thank you very much!
dpwtr@reddit
Yes, which is why still having to live with delayed transfers is more ridiculous.
Not_That_Magical@reddit
Uk banks have more regulations to deal with than the EU, especially with consumer protection and refund policies.
mikedavd@reddit
The majority of payments you'd make in the UK would be faster payments, which are instant, even on weekends and bank holidays.
paulmclaughlin@reddit
Because the Bills of Exchange Act 1882 says so.
Nimble_Natu177@reddit
If you care about your money, I'd much prefer this to be the case.
VolcanicBear@reddit
You're asking for someone to manually approve every transfer? Do you understand the concept of getting bored and stopping paying attention?
NoExperience9717@reddit
They don't manually approve every transaction. There's automated systems flagging items based on size, where its going, payment descriptions, other algorithms which they then might hold and enquire about with the payer.
There's probably also batch approvals in place on a total level.
VolcanicBear@reddit
I know. I'm saying there shouldn't be any manual intervention. (Outside of an investigation after automated fraud detection triggers anyway).
BigFaithlessness618@reddit
It's not this at all but if there is an incident you want the right people to be able to fix things.
Although mostly automated banking systems are super complicated with lots of moving parts using infrastructure which sometimes hasn't been updated in decades.
It also involves lots of different organisations so you would need all of them to agree to come in on bank holidays before it's worth taking the additional risk.
The benefit is absolutely tiny for the amount of work it would take.
Nimble_Natu177@reddit
This is what I'm getting at.
Kyle_2099@reddit
I care about my money so I don't want this to be the case.
Nimble_Natu177@reddit
If you don't think manual oversight for money is a good thing, I'm going to assume you are either still on pocket money or still live with your parents.
TehDragonGuy@reddit
Humans are magnitudally more prone to error than a computer system. I would dread for there to be somebody on the other end manually approving each transaction.
Low-Captain1721@reddit
Only some transactions such as DD, SO, BACS etc are limited to working days.
You can make transactions such as DC withdrawals and transfers 24/7.
I returned something to Argos a few weeks ago on a Saturday morning, the DC refund was credited to my bank about 4pm day after (Sunday).
RealLongwayround@reddit
Is BACS really limited to working days? I sent various payments between my accounts with different banks over the bank holiday weekend. They all arrived swiftly. (Not to be confused with SWIFT-ly.)
mikedavd@reddit
BACS are 3 day payments. You would've been making faster payments, which are instant 24/7
Koda614@reddit
In an ideal world at least. Faster payments is officially marketed as typically within 2 hours, and can be delayed by up to 24 hours if held by maintenance, security checking, or pretty much any other excuse they would like to use.
FPS Payments are subject to delays more than you probably imagine. Even ignoring security checks and maintenance, Metro Bank average 40 minutes for transfers, HSBC/First Direct regularly take the full 2 hours timed to the exact minute, and Co-op bank can take several hours if you're processing a payment outside of business times.
They no longer do it now, but I remember about 10 years ago when I was with Clydesdale bank, you could only submit a faster payment instruction between 8 and 8 every day. After that you would have to come back the next day. And receiving a payment you wouldn't get any incoming funds until 8AM the next morning either.
Even with the bigger mainstream institutions, I've seen them all push out regular notices warning customers of delays, through maintenance or otherwise.
RealLongwayround@reddit
Thanks. I guess this is something which is sufficiently simple to consumers that we simply don’t need to know most of the time!
ian9outof10@reddit
You’re not using BACS for account to account, you’re using the Faster Payments Service, which is designed for automatic, fast transfers. Although in reality they’re not as fast as they appear. The money doesn’t move immediately, it’s just credited as such. In the background the money moves during a settlement cycle.
BACS is a fairly involved system that’s reliant on quite a lot of different parts to work. Not least, it has to be settled via the Bank of England and it isn’t really designed to be a high availability system, it’s mostly just very, very cheap to use. The whole system is supposed to be running over the course of three days and the use case for it is predictable transactions that happen regularly.
Faster Payments is a more “modern” version of that service designed for single transactions, where BACS is more useful to salaries and direct debits.
f1zoe@reddit
Are you sure they where not sent with Faster Payments rather than BACS? those are more common now for small/medium transfers from your account to friend or family account or even for a business like a solicitor or a car dealer.
Efficient_Chic714@reddit
Fun fact, the payment provider a company use have approval settings to automatically authorise refunds when the card machine is reconciled at the end of the night. It’s the works the same for payments where if they forget to reconcile the card machine (we’ve all been there) charges will be pending for days. It’s also why your account shows as pending when a failed payment is made, your bank just knows there’s an attempt but because it’s not confirmed at the end of the day (or longer for some company’s) it’s released again.
I worked for a company that didn’t offer refunds except for faulty items and those weren’t set up automatically. I had to call someone in head office (Monday to Friday ofc) to approve each refund request individually because the store wasn’t allowed the permissions to do it.
Maybe not a fun fact but I thought it was interesting how it works 😅
Grump-Dog@reddit
The bank makes money using your deposits. E.g., Say they pay you 0% interest on a checking account then lend that money out to a credit card customer at 10%. If they delay your $100 transfer for one day and make a 10% interest differential, then that’s 100*(10%/365) =$0.0274. It’s a bit more complicated than that - capital reserve requirements, compound interest, etc. - but that’s essentially the banking business model. Of course, 3 cents is not much. But in aggregate, banks make money by obtaining cash through deposits at low interest rates to fund higher interest loans. It is very much to their benefit to delay transfers out and keep using your money, so they do.
It is not a system issue. If banking systems were not capable of instantaneous transfers, then ATMS would not work, because an ATM withdrawal is an instantaneous transfers. There is no technical reason that a bank can transfer money from your account to the ATM at your local supermarket in two seconds but requires two days to transfer the same money to another bank account.
2ndboomiscoming@reddit
ATM settlement is not instantaneous. Your card issuer will inform the ATM if the withdrawal is approved, allowing the cash to be dispensed, but settlement generally happens next business day.
NoExperience9717@reddit
Banks need to do various checks before moving millions or billions in payments often internationally. So there will be an ops team looking into items flagged by the system. I'm an accountant and banks do flag business payments they think might be unusual and ask about them. So yes there are people verifying transactions in the background.
spectrumero@reddit
Most of them do, Faster Payments (e.g. your typical bank transfer) works 24/7/365.
YetAnotherInterneter@reddit
“Many of them”
Gives one example.
Faster payments is the exception, given the name “faster”. All other payments methods are postponed until the next working day.
04housemat@reddit
Just old bullshit systems.
PolarLocalCallingSvc@reddit
They do, depending on the type of transaction.
FPS, card authorisations, card presentments, all work on weekends.
CHAPS, BACS, not so. But these are usually large batches of payments and if something goes wrong it is handy to actually have people in front of a computer to fix the problem, which isn't usually the case on weekends and bank holidays. BoE have consulted on extending CHAPS settlement hours before but the overall opinion returned was no thanks.
FlippingGerman@reddit
Do things go wrong often - or often enough that this is necessary (by some definition)? Or is it more paranoia?
Efficient_Chic714@reddit
I think because it’s money, it only needs to happen once for people to be really stressed and unhappy. There are so many different banks that if you had an issue with one that wasn’t resolved quickly you have the opportunity to move elsewhere so it’s best for them all to have the same safeguardings in place just in case
PolarLocalCallingSvc@reddit
I expect the number of human and payroll errors made in CHAPS and BACS is probably high enough. But then as any standard risk assessment goes, it's impact multiplied by likelihood. Likelihood may be low but potential impact high. Imagine say an employer with 5000 members of staff paid an average £3k/month each, that's a £15m batch.
Cultural_Tank_6947@reddit
Habit. Largely, just habit.
Could you change it? Of course. But what's the return on investment to that change?
As an individual, I can still withdraw cash from the cash machine (if I can find one), I can still make faster payments if I need to.
So really just BACS, standing orders and direct debits move to the next working day.
It's one of those things that could be changed but there's very little motivation to change it.
Unhappy_Clue701@reddit
I bank with Starling. Payments move on the day specified, not ‘next working day’. The regular standing orders to the joint account, for example, will go on a Sunday, a bank holiday, whatever. If it’s the 26th, it goes out.
AndrewHinds67@reddit
I've often wondered this. I've also known ATM machines to not work in bank holidays.
imtheorangeycenter@reddit
Probs coz everyone has taken all the cash out for ice creams.
mikec62x@reddit
It’s mainly the high street banks for some payments. Scheduled payments including standing orders can go through on a weekend or bank holiday at Monzo and starling, and I think even at Barclays. Direct debits and bacs affect the whole banking system so all banks would need to change at the same time, so not so easy to change.
Rooky030@reddit
Because banks don't process transactions in real-time they batch them. Thousands of payments are queued and settled in bulk windows, usually overnight on working days
Tunit66@reddit
“Faster transfers” like app payments still work on weekendd
mainukfeed@reddit
Because they don't work on those days?
PomegranateEither768@reddit
I hated when Natwest stopped Saturday payments. Barclays still do them, and I think some others do too but Natwest stopped years ago frustratingly! They closed branches down and stopped services that were helpful at the same time.
gt94sss2@reddit
Cost. It would be very expensive to do and for little to no return on the investment.
Zealousideal-Low3388@reddit
If there’s a weird problem with a payment or transfer, you want that happening on a day when the department who can fix it are fully staffed
ImmediatePiano6690@reddit
Because they refuse to change with the times, funny thing is there are those who enjoy the luxury of a bank holiday but will be outraged at supermarkets opening for 6 hours on a Sunday.
Mind you, many of those places are also fully closed on a Sunday, the one of two days the majority of people have a day off.
chefshoes@reddit (OP)
this is true! its a bit like the mass panic of food shopping on xmas eve when everything opens the day after boxing day, no one is going to starve, calm down
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