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Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in the EU: Wait more than 48 hours between countries and in the same country wait up to 24 hours. And let's not think about weekends in between ;)

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Except in the UK, when it's normally transferred within a few seconds, or a maximum of two hours ("Faster Payments").

The Faster Payment system always tells me that I may have to wait two hours, and then it is instant.

Have you ever had one take longer than zero time?

I guess they want to deter people phoning to complain because there is some minor delay in the system?

I've had instances where it's taken more than hour, although it usually is as near instant as physically possible.

It's for agency banks that aren't full FPS members. They have to rely on the full member banks to clear for them - the maximum allowed time for this is 2 hours.

Hah, I love that, I've never had it take more than about 20 seconds.

I have accounts with two banks (one for personal, one for joint finance with my wife) and FP makes that so easy to manage, if the joint account needs topping up I can do it in a minute or two on my laptop or phone.

Never! Maybe they randomly check suspicious transactions. I had a look for some statistics of the transfer time, but wasn't able to find any public data.

I had one take about 20 minutes, literally once.

Old-school SEPA transfers take only a few hours between modern banks, even across borders.

SCT inst is gradually coming. Bear in mind the SEPA area covers some 500 million people, it's no small feat compared to much smaller domestic markets (Nordic European countries have been ahead of Australia in this regard).

I've never ever seen a SEPA transfer real cross border go through in a few hours in my life!

12 hours was the fastest for me...

ok, that I've seen I think :)

Last September I was in Armenia. I paid at a supermarket with my debit card. I immediately opened my banking app for my Dutch bank, and the amount was already withdrawn.

The withdrawal is instant, however the recipient waits for a few hours to a few days.

Where in EU? Transfer is almost instant in the same bank where I live and between banks you may wait a couple of hours, unless you do the transfer after the last clearing. Even in that case the waiting time is less than 18 hours.

Not in Portugal where people use MB Way for instant (~1 second) transfers. It's been around for a while and it relies on phone numbers too.

Can't say I've ever heard of anyone using it, though, and I worked at a software company.

There's so much wrong in this statement, it's a wonder how this was possible.

Inter-country and intra-country transfers are all identical (all running via SEPA) and should make no difference.

SEPA transfers are legally limited to 24 hours already.

SEPA ICT is being rolled out right now, from summer on most banks should support it, which transfers up to €15'000 in 10 seconds.

you maybe never lived in other countries in the EU. It takes more than 24 hours. Client gives order to his bank in country A on Monday evening, bank will execute this order next morning because bank is closed. Money will be transferred from bank A to bank B within this 24 hours. Client b sees on mid day on day 3 or even 4, that's Wednesday (or Thursday) his money on his bank account. Don't tell me about the law... it does not work (and maybe only interbank it works) and I know from practicall experience this is not untypical.

This is the problem about talking about the EU like it's one country, it's not.

As another commentator pointed out, the UK it's instant, now it turns out in Germany it's also instant.

That's 150 million EU citizens.

You shouldn't make assumptions that whatever happens in your country, it happens for the rest of the EU.

Here's Holland's transfer times:

https://hoeveelkrijgjij.nl/blog/belastingen/hoe-lang-duurt-g...

That's another country that takes less than 24 hours. I picked them because when I often visited there as a child they seemingly had chip + pin way before the UK, so I assumed they'd be quite advanced. Not quite so as advanced as UK/Germany though. My Dutch isn't great but it looks like it's same day as long as it's before 15:30 on a working day, otherwise next working day. France I'm struggling with as google is obsessed about giving me UK to France bank account wait times.

Good comment! My experience is with several bank transfers between this 4 countries: Lithuania, Cyprus, UK, Germany (all EU / EEA). Don't assume because it works in Germany and France it works everywhere that way!

I live in Germany, and I'm using online banking with the Commerzbank (normal account), Postbank (savings) and N26 (CC).

I've done hundreds of transfers, sent and received.

In fact, frequently I transfer money to ny parents, or they to any of my accounts (they use commerzbank or postbank), and usually within of 10 minutes my phone gives me a push notification that the transaction has completed and the money is there.

What you are describing are transfers in the same bank. This are totally different than doing real cross border SEPA transfers. I'm only describing my experience with 4 countries (Lithuania, Cyprus, UK, Germany: all EU / EEA)

@kuschku: Well banking system from German and French banks are probably more advanced and faster. It does not work everywhere in EU that way.

I'm describing transfers Commerzbank->N26, Postbank->Commerzbank, and then, for my server payments, transactions Commerzbank->whatever French bank Scaleway/Online.net uses.

Interesting. That's definitely not true for my DKB and Sparkasse accounts in Germany.

Most German banks should finish rolling out ICT in summer, so things should improve in a few months.

And often banks have copperations, where, between cooperating banks, transactions already run much faster.

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