question: Why does it take several days to perform some electronic banking activities? It's COMPUTERS.
comment: Everything's a batch job that happens once a day because the infrastructure was built 50 years ago, and fixing it now would require coordinating the change of thousands of interconnected systems. A difficult, and prone to catastrophic failure process. I don't know the specific steps to various financial transactions, but you'll have your bank do their internal stuff at 3:00 in the morning, then send a batch to a clearinghouse the next night, then destination bank has to process, and a confirmation goes back , at which point things get committed...
passages: In addition, following Check 21, "cut off" times are typically later for Personal Teller Machines as physical checks do not need to be gathered and collected to be delivered to a separate check processing location. Substitute checks, or digital images of the original check, can be utilized to process the transaction. This can result in the typical 3PM business day "cut off" for a branch being extended well into the evening. This could greatly benefit customers by making their funds available even sooner than visiting a branch teller window.
  
  Section::::Types of Video Banking.:Location Convenience.
   Completions of new home purchases were delayed, and some people were stranded abroad. Another account holder was threatened with the discontinuation of their life support machine in a Mexican hospital, and one man was held in prison. As a result of the error, RBS and NatWest announced that over 1200 of their busiest branches would extend their hours throughout the week, including the bank's first Sunday opening, to enable affected customers to access cash. On Monday 25 June, over 1000 branches opened for extended hours, and the number of phone staff was doubled to deal with customer queries.
   In May 2005 the task force announced that agreement had been reached to reduce clearing times for phone, Internet and standing order payments. This committed the payments services industry to develop a system able to clear automated payments in no more than half a day – the so-called "ELLE" model – resulting in payment being received the "same day" if made sufficiently early. Implementation groups were given six months to bring forward detailed proposals.
   In 2012, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security advised all banks to consider the PC systems of their users being infected by malware by default and therefore use security processes where the user can cross-check the transaction data against manipulations like for example (provided the security of the mobile phone holds up) SMS TAN where the transaction data is sent along with the TAN number or standalone smartcard readers with an own screen including the transaction data into the TAN generation process while displaying it beforehand to the user (see chipTAN) to counter man-in-the-middle attacks.
  
  Section::::See also.
   In addition to a duress code, there is duress activity. This may include the duressed individual withdrawing cash from an ATM using a specific credit card, instead of using their debit card. Many credit card companies allow for email alerts to be set up when specific activity occurs. There are technical issues that could pose problems, such as a delay in notification, cellular network availability, and the fact that a location is not disclosed, only the activity.
   A bank might be interested in minimizing the amount of money it borrows overnight from a central bank. Interbank transfers must be communicated and arranged through automation by a set time each business day. The failure of any vital communication could cost the bank large sums in interest charged by the central bank. A BAM solution would be programmed to become aware of each message and await confirmation. Failure to receive confirmation within a reasonable amount of time would be grounds for the BAM solution to raise an alarm that would set in motion manual intervention to investigate the cause of the delay and to push the problem toward resolution before it becomes costly.
   A software update was applied on 19 June 2012 to RBS's CA-7 software which controls its payment processing system. It later emerged that the update was corrupted by RBS technical staff. Customers' wages, payments and other transactions were disrupted. Some customers were unable to withdraw cash using ATMs or to see bank account details. Others faced fines for late payment of bills because the system could not process direct debits.
   Several very different approaches were used to solve the Year 2000 problem in legacy systems. Four of them follow:
  
  BULLET::::- Date expansion
  
  BULLET::::- Date compression
  
  BULLET::::- Date re-partitioning
  
  BULLET::::- Windowing
  
  BULLET::::- Software Solutions
  
  Section::::Documented errors.
  
  Section::::Documented errors.:Before 2000.
  
  BULLET::::- On 28 December 1999, 10,000 card swipe machines issued by HSBC and manufactured by Racal stopped processing credit and debit card transactions. The stores relied on paper transactions until the machines started working again on 1 January.
  
  Section::::Documented errors.:On 1 January 2000.
   On 26 June, RBS admitted that some transactions were still affected by the problem. Ulster Bank said on Wednesday 27 June that it did not expect full services to be restored until the start of the following week, but that it hoped that the automatic payments backlog would be cleared by the weekend.
  
  On 3 July RBS admitted that some RBS and NatWest personal loan borrowers had accidentally been charged twice and newspapers advised RBS customers to check their balances.
   DCA payments are processed by the sponsoring bank according to their Service Level Agreements - for Barclays this is currently a maximum of 30 minutes before the payment is sent to the beneficiary bank. Beneficiary banks which are members of FPS must apply the funds to the beneficiary account within 2 hours, although in most cases it is done immediately. 
  
  Section::::Bureaux.
  
  Bureau organisations can submit files of payments on behalf of other registered service users of Direct Corporate Access.
   Earlier in 2011, the company announced that by the use of supercomputers, the time taken to assess risk had been greatly reduced, from arriving at a conclusion within hours to what is now minutes. The banking corporation uses for this calculation Field-Programmable Gate Array technology.
  
  Section::::Operations.:History.
   A 2008 U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Technology Incident Report, compiled from suspicious activity reports banks file quarterly, lists 536 cases of computer intrusion, with an average loss per incident of $30,000. That adds up to a nearly $16-million loss in the second quarter of 2007. Computer intrusions increased by 150 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the second. In 80 percent of the cases, the source of the intrusion is unknown but it occurred during online banking, the report states.
   Hard deadline processes abort transactions that have passed the deadline, improving the system by cleaning out clutter that needs to be processed. Processes can clear out not only the transactions with expired deadlines but also transactions with the longest deadlines, assuming that once they reach the processor they would be obsolete. This means other transactions should be of higher priority. In addition, a system can remove the least critical transactions. When I was pre-selecting classes on during a high traffic period, a field in the database can become so busy with registration requests that it was unavailable for a while and the result of my transaction was a display of the SQL query sent and a message that said that the data is currently unavailable. This error is caused by the checker, a mechanism that checks the condition of the rules, and the rule that occurred before it.
   Section::::Overview.
   After a customer has made a payment using BPAY, the financial institution where the payment was made would send by electronic funds transfer the payment details to the biller's bank (if different) and the biller's bank would credit the biller's designated bank account with the payment amount, and the biller will be advised of the customer reference number and payment amount, for automatic or manual entry into its accounting system. Transactions completed before a cut-off time set by the financial institution will normally be processed and paid on the same day, otherwise it will be processed on the next business day. The remitting bank may charge the biller's bank an interchange fee.
   Banking software is used by millions of users across hundreds or thousands of branches. This means that the software must be managed on many machines even in a small bank. The core banking system is a major investment for a retail banks and maintaining and managing the system can represent a large part of the cost of running a bank.
  
  Section::::Categories.:Investment banks.
  
  Investment banks use software to manage their trading desks and their clients accountants. These systems often connect to financial markets such as securities exchanges or third party providers of such as Financial data vendors.
   On the morning of June 7, 2017, a data processing glitch affected BPI clients making their account balances incorrect. Some clients had either a negative balance or an increased amount of money in their account. The error was fixed in the evening, but the next day, June 8, BPI suspended electronic services because incorrect balances occurred again. The services were restored once more on the evening of the same day upon fixing the defect.
  
  Section::::BPI Direct Savings Bank.
   BULLET::::- On 24 March 2014, Jiangsu Sheyang Rural Commercial Bank in Yancheng, China suffered a three-day bank run after rumors of the bank turning down a cash withdrawal transaction emerged. Supposedly, some branches remained open for 24 hours for the duration of the bank run, and tellers stacked cash behind teller windows to calm and reassure depositors.
   Subsequent to the announcement on both the official blog and by e-mail, users were asked to safeguard credit card transactions by checking bank statements. This warning came nearly a week after the initial "external intrusion" and while the Network was turned off.
   ACHs process large volumes of credit and debit transactions in batches. ACH credit transfers are initiated by the payer and include payments such as: direct deposits, payrolls, retail payments and vendor payments. ACH direct debit collections are initiated by the payee with pre-authorization from the payer; ACH direct debits include consumer payments such as utility bills, insurance premiums, mortgage loans, and other types of bills. Transactions received by the bank during the day are stored and transmitted in batches to the ACH. ACHs are net settlement systems, so settlement may be delayed for day(s), and there is some settlement risk. ACHs may allow for the transfer of a limited amount of additional information along with payment instructions.
   Before the 1970s it used to take at least a day for a transaction to reflect in the real account because each branch had their local servers, and the data from the server in each branch was sent in a batch to the servers in the data center only at the end of the day (EOD).
   Traditionally, making payments involves many departments in a bank. Both initiating a payment to be sent and processing a received payment may take days. In the past, payments were initiated through numerous "human-friendly" (aka paper-based) means, such as a human through a paper order, over the phone, or via fax. The payment order was input into the bank's payment system, then confirmed by a supervisor. This confirmation ensured an accurate match of input versus order before sending the payment. When multiple banks, countries or currencies were involved, the process often took several hours. When the complexity of the payment was higher, the amount of labor increased and additional human intervention resulted in more risk of errors, longer processing time, and higher costs.
   Following the attacks, SWIFT announced a new regime of mandatory controls required of all banks using the system. SWIFT will inspect member banks for compliance, and inform regulators and other banks of noncompliance.
   Fast performance with a rapid response time is critical. Transaction processing systems are usually measured by the number of transactions they can process in a given period of time.
  
  Section::::Transaction processing system features.:Continuous availability.
  
  The system must be available during the time period when the users are entering transactions. Many organizations rely heavily on their TPS; a breakdown will disrupt operations or even stop the business.
  
  Section::::Transaction processing system features.:Data integrity.
   Over the following 30 years most banks moved to core banking applications to support their operations creating a Centralized Online Real-time Exchange (or Environment) (CORE). This meant that all the bank's branches could access applications from centralized data centers. Deposits made were reflected immediately on the bank's servers, and the customer could withdraw the deposited money from any of the bank's branches. 
  
  Section::::Software.
  
presuppositions: Electronic banking should be instant since it is all computers.
corrections: Electronic banking uses infrastructure built 50 years ago, so it is slow.
raw_presuppositions: Electronic banking should be instant since it is all computers. Electronic banking should be instant since it is all computers.
raw_corrections: Electronic banking uses infrastructure built 50 years ago, so it is slow. Electronic banking uses infrastructure built 50 years ago, so it is slow.