This delay has become more apparent and more irritating during the continuing financial crisis, as consumers seek two basics: safety and yield. (Yields on these savings accounts have tended to be higher than those on money-market accounts.)
But in a remarkably interconnected, instantaneous world, where a debit-card purchase shows up in our bank accounts right away, it's equally remarkable that online transfers can be so slow.
Here's the hitch: Funds transferred between two different banks or a bank and a brokerage firm aren't really sent "online" in the way we have come to expect. Instead, these large transfers move in steps. Banks have slowed down the process further to reduce the chance of fraud, even though such fraud is fairly rare. (Years ago, Congress forced banks to speed up the clearing of checks and the availability of deposits, but it hasn't addressed electronic payments.)
You may have seen this when you tried to move money to or from a brokerage account. I ran into it most recently when I went to my ING Direct savings account first thing on a Monday morning to transfer money for a new car to my Bank of America checking account. While it showed up as "pending" on Wednesday, it wasn't mine to spend until Thursday.
What happens during that time? ING sends transactions in batches during the day to an automated clearinghouse, which sorts them and moves them to the receiving bank in a matter of two to four hours, according to Arkadi Kuhlmann, chief executive officer of ING Direct USA, a unit of ING Groep NV, and Elliott C. McEntee, chief executive of Nacha, the Electronic Payments Association, a not-for-profit group that oversees the automated clearinghouses.
In many cases, the receiving bank gets the transfer the same day. Under rules established by Nacha, money that moves on Monday should be available by the end of Tuesday. If the transfer slips to early Tuesday morning, the money should be available first thing Wednesday morning.
The banks say they want to avoid fraud, such as transfers from bad accounts, or when someone else gets hold of your online sign-on name and password and tries to move your money somewhere else. According to numbers compiled by the American Bankers Association, about $969 million was lost to fraud in 2006, the most recent year available, out of about $41.7 trillion in checking-related transactions, a number kept very low in part because of aggressive risk-management practices. But even when attempted fraud is factored in, more than 99.9% of checking transactions are good.
Here's what you can do if you want to transfer money between institutions:
- Plan ahead and send transfers early in the day to have a better chance of a faster transaction.
- Ironically, you can move your money faster with an old-fashioned paper check. See if your money-market account offers check-writing privileges, or open a small checking account at the same bank as your online account. Transfers within the same bank usually happen the same day.
- If the transactions take longer than two business days, complain to the bank where the transfer originated. Nacha doesn't regulate how long a bank can hold onto a deposit "pulled" from another bank to be sure the funds are there. But it does have rules, and can assess fines, if funds "pushed" from another bank aren't credited quickly.
- Hang on. Europe already has a much faster system, and systems to speed up the process here are under development, though they won't be ready for at least a couple of years.
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