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.