Why are interbank payment (settlement) systems closed for weekends and holidays?
"The second part of your question is the easiest to answer, how much manual work is involved in settlement processes? Payment systems which handle low value (i.e. high volume) transactions work on the basis of net settlement. Each of the individual payments are netted across all of the participant banks, so that only one ""real"" payment is made by each bank. Some days banks will receive money, others they will pay money. This is arbitrary and depends on whether their outbound payments exceed their inbound payments for that day.   The payment system will notify each Bank how much it owes/will receive for the day. The money is then transferred between all of the banks simultaneously by the payment system to remove the risk that some pay and others don't. If you're going to make or receive a very large payment, you're going to want to make certain that its correct. This means that if there's a discrepancy, you need operations people available to find out why its wrong.   When dealing with this many payments, answering that question can be hard. Did we miss a payment? Is there a duplicate? Etc.  The vast majority of payments will process without any human involvement, but to make the process work, you always need human brains there to fix problems that occur. This brings me to your first question. On every day that settlement happens, a bank will receive (or pay) a very large sum of money. As a settlement bank you must settle that money - the guarantee that every bank will pay is one of the main reasons these systems exist. For settlement to happen, every bank has to agree to participate, and be ready to verify the data on their side and deliver the funds from their account. So there is no particular reason that this doesn't happen on weekends and holidays other than history. But for any payment system to change, it would require the support of (at least) a majority of participants to pay staff to manage the settlement process on weekends. This would increase costs for banks, but the benefits would only really be for you and me (if at all). That means it's unlikely to happen unless a government forces the issue." TARGET2 is a high value realtime settlement system across Europe and for this to be open on weekends would mean all the Banks including Central Banks in the Euro Zone work. Quite a few times to manage intra day liquidity, banks borrow from each other, hence there is an active monitering of the liquidity by Banks. The borrowing happens over phone and fax and the lending bank sending a high value transaction that credits the borrowing banks. These is the day to day job of treasury group [highly paid individuals] to manage liquidity. Now if on weekends the volume is less, it does not make sense to keep these people, the cost of supporting this for very insiginificant business gain is not driving to build such systems.  On the other hand on retail transactions, say Cards [Debit / Credit], ATM, the value is not high and hence there is no treasury function involved and there is a huge need, everything is automated. So no issues.
"All public US equity exchanges are closed on the 9 US trading holidays (see below) and open on all other days.  Exchanges also close early (13:00 ET) on the Friday after Thanksgiving and on the day before Independence Day if Independence Day is being observed on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.  (Some venues have extended trading hours as a matter of course; for them an ""early close"" might be later than 13:00 ET.) To answer the second question, yes, if you know NASDAQ's or AMEX's holiday schedule, then you know NYSE's (modulo the timing of their early close).  I'm not sure about the options exchanges; they're not regulated the same way and are a good example of exchanges with extended trading hours in the first place. The US trading holidays are as follows.  Note that trading holidays are not the same as federal or bank holidays, which include Columbus Day and Veterans Day but do not include Good Friday." "From my days in e-commerce they break down like this? The company doesn't know a debit from a credit card.  Got the Visa logo, then it is a Visa through the company's payment gateway.  The gateway talks to the bank and that is where the particulars for money is figured out. When I programmed gateway interfaces, I had the option to ""authorize"" or check for funds (which didn't reserve anything, just verified funds existed), run for batch (which put a hold on the funds and collected them at the end of the night) or just take the money. Most places did a verify during the early checkout stages and then did a batch at the end of the night.  The nightly batch allows a merchant to cancel a transaction without getting charged a fee. The ""authorize"" doesn't mean the money is tied up, although that might be your banks policy.  Furthermore, an authorize can only last for so many days.  This also explains why most of your banks don't report your transactions to you the day of.  There is a bunch more activity on your card than the transactions that complete." They're batched typically and about 30-90 days out typically, though the speed is routinely increasing the last few years. The flow depends from payment processor to payment processor. Generally, the cheaper the payment processing the longer the delay.  The future of this stuff is blockchain if you'd like to look at that  http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/blockchain/ credit cards are almost never closed for inactivity. i have had dozens of cards innactive for years on end, and only one was ever closed on me for inactivity. i would bet a single 1$ transaction per calendar year would keep all your cards open.  as such, you could forget automating the process and just spend 20 minutes a year making manual 1$ payments (e.g. to your isp, utility company, google play, etc.).  alternatively, many charities will let you set up an automatic monthly donation for any amount (e.g. 1$ to wikipedia). or perhaps you could treat yourself to an mp3 once a month (arguably a charitable donation in the age of file sharing). side note: i use both of these strategies to get the 12 debit card transactions per month required by my kasasa checking account. Surprisingly accurate. Are you in the industry? I usually see wildly incorrect info about processing online. (I work in processing.)  Only part not quite correct:   &gt;At the end of the day, week, whatever, the processor collects money from the issuing financial institution and is responsible for giving the right amount -- less fees -- to the merchant.  The acquiring bank/processor actually fronts money to the merchant (typically within 1-2 days.) The issuing bank later reimburses the acquiring bank/processor, less interchange fees. The processor then deducts the interchange fee amount and their markup from the merchant's account, making themselves whole from the original money fronting and getting their profit.  That's why there's risk to processors when it comes to chargebacks. If a transaction is fraudulent, the issuing bank isn't going to give them money for it, but they've already given money to the merchant. So they need to be able to recoup it from the merchant or they'll be out that money.  But yeah, definitely a service, and it's odd that people often argue that it isn't. "Debit Cards have a certain processing delay, ""lag time"", before the transaction from the vendor completes with your bank. In the US it's typically 3 business days but I have seen even a 15 day lag from Panera Bread. I guess in the UK, payment processors have similar processing delays. A business is not obliged to run its payment processing in realtime, as that's very expensive. Whatever be the lag time, your bank is supposed to cover the payment you promised through your card. Now if you don't have agreements in place (for example, overdraft) with your bank, they will likely have to turn down payments that exceed your available balance. Here is the raw deal: In the end, the responsibility to ensure that your available balance is enough is upon you (and whether you have agreements in place to handle such situations) So what happened is very much legal, a business is not obliged to run its payment processing in realtime and no ethics are at stake. To ensure such things do not happen to me, I used to use a sub-account from which my debit card used to get paid. I have since moved to credit cards as the hassle of not overdrawing was too much (and overdraft fees from banks in the US are disastrous, especially for people who actually need such a facility)" I've been hearing storied from Germans that this is happening in Germany, too, but at the bank level. All anecdotal, people I've met telling me their personal stories, but they follow the same pattern. Go to the bank, try to take out a few grand for a vacation or large purchase, bank tells them they can't have that much and that they just have to do with less, even if the account balance covers the withdrawal. Looking at your dates, I think I see a pattern.  It appears that your statement closing date is always 17 business days before the last business day of the month.  For example, if you start at May 31 and start counting backwards, skipping Saturdays, Sundays, and May 30 (Memorial Day), you'll see that May 5 is 17 business days before May 31.  I cannot explain why Bank of America would do this.  If you ask them, let us know what they say. If it bothers you, find another bank.  I do most of my banking (checking, savings, etc.) with a local credit union. Their statements end on the last day of the month, every month without fail. (Very nice, in my opinion.) I have two credit cards with nationally known banks, and although those statements end in the middle of the month, they are consistently on the same date every month. (One of them is on the 13th; the other date I can't recall right now.) You are right, a computer does the work, and your statement date should be able to fall on a weekend without trouble. Even when these were assembled by hand, the statement date could still be on a weekend, and they just wouldn't write it up until the following Monday.  You should be able to find another bank or credit union that does this. "Company values (and thus stock prices) rely on a much larger time frame than ""a weekend"".  First, markets are not efficient enough to know what a companies sales were over the past 2-3 days (many companies do not even know that for several weeks).  They look at performance over quarters and years to determine the ""value"" of a company.  They also look forward, not backwards to determine value.  Prior performance only gives a hint of what future performance may be.  If a company shut its doors over a weekend and did no sales, it still would have value based on its future ability to earn profits." "ACH transfers are the evolution of paper check clearing houses. Transactions are conducted in bulk and do not immediately settle -- the drawer and drawee still retain liability for a period of days or weeks after the transaction date. (I'd suggest looking to the legal definition of a check or draft to understand this better.) A for-fee wire transfer still goes through an intermediary, but settle immediately and irrevocably. Wire transfers are analogous to handing cash to someone.  In the US, the various Federal Reserve banks are involved because they are the central banks of the the United States.  In the past, bank panics were started or exacerbated when banks would refuse to honor drafts drawn on other banks of questionable stability. Imagine what would happen today if your electric company refused to accept Bank of America or Citibank's check/ACH transactions? Wouldn't you get withdraw every penny you could from BoA? During the 1907 banking panic, many solvent banks collapsed when the system of bank ""subscriptions"" (ie. arrangements where small town banks would ""subscribe"" to large commercial banks for check clearing, etc) broke down. Farmers, small business people and individuals lost everything, all because the larger banks would not (or could not) risk holding drafts/checks from the smaller banks." Your chief problem seems to be that you're mixing Visa (credit cards) and Step2 (a European Automated Clearing House). Credit cards are primarily an American concept, but do work worldwide especially in travel&tourism industry. The Credit Card companies are financial institutions themselves and operate similar to international banks They're typically acting as intermediaries between the customer's bank and the retailer's bank, so this works even if those two banks have no existing agreements.  This is expensive, though. Step2 is a cheaper European system which eliminates the middle man. It allows the consumer's bank to directly pay the retailer's bank. VISA is not a member of Step2. Some companies have banks and brokerages that are completely separate systems. So you could be actually running ACH transactions between two different banking entities. Bank of America used to have significant latency between BoA accounts, because they ran into delays integrating Fleet, BankSouth and BoA systems. "In the US, this was the case during the 19th century. There was a system of ""subscriptions"" between banks, where larger banks backed the smaller banks to some extent. In trade, notes from distant banks were not accepted or discounted relative to known local banks, or silver/gold coinage. There were a number of problems with this system which came to a head during the Panic of 1907. During this crisis, a cascading series of banking failures was only stopped by the personal intervention of JP Morgan. Even when Morgan intervened, it was very difficult to make capital available in a way that avoided the panic. The subsequent creation of the Federal Reserve was a response to that crisis." It is because 17th was Friday, 18th-19th were weekends and 20th was a holiday on the Toronto Stock Exchange (Family Day). Just to confirm you could have picked up another stock trading on TMX and observed the price movements. Every bank and credit union in the US has a Deposit Agreement and Disclosures document, Bank of America is no different. Our general policy is to make funds from your cash and check deposits   available to you no later  than the first business day after the day   of your deposit. However, in some cases we place a hold  on funds that   you deposit by check. A hold results in a delay in the availability of   these funds. that sounds great but ... For determining the availability of your deposits, every day is a   business day, except Saturdays,   Sundays, and federal holidays.   If   you make a deposit on a business day that we are open at one of our   financial centers before   2:00 p.m. local time, or at one of our ATMs   before 5:00 p.m. local time in the state where we  maintain your   account, we consider that day to be the day of your deposit. However,   if you make  a deposit after such times, or on a day when we are not   open or that is not a business day, we  consider that the deposit was   made on the next business day we are open. Some locations have    different cutoff times. so if you deposit a check on Friday afternoon, the funds are generally available on Tuesday. but not always... In some cases, we will not make all of the funds that you deposit by   check available to you by the  first business day after the day of   your deposit. Depending on the type of check that you deposit,  funds   may not be available until the second business day after the day of   your deposit. The first  $200 of your deposits, however, may be   available no later than the first business day after the day  of your   deposit.  If we are not going to make all of the funds from your   deposit available by the first business  day after the day of your   deposit, we generally notify you at the time you make your deposit. We   also tell you when the funds will be available. Ok what happens when the funds are available... In many cases, we make funds from your deposited checks available to   you sooner than we  are able to collect the checks. This means that,   from time to time, a deposited check may be  returned unpaid after we   made the funds available to you. Please keep in mind that even though    we make funds from a deposited check available to you and you withdraw   the funds, you are  still responsible for problems with the deposit.   If a check you deposited is returned to us unpaid  for any reason, you   will have to repay us and we may charge your account for the amount of   the  check, even if doing so overdraws your account. Fidelity has a similar document: Each check deposited is promptly credited to your account.  However,   the money may not be available until up to six business  days later,   and we may decline to honor any debit that is applied  against the   money before the deposited check has cleared. If a deposited check does not clear, the deposit will be removed  from   your account, and you are responsible for returning any  interest you   received on it. I would think that the longer holding period for Fidelity is due to the fact that they want to wait long enough to make sure that the number of times they have to undo investments due to the funds not clearing is nearly zero.