Hacker News Reader

I thought (and maybe just my personal conspiracy feeling) that banks lagged on transactions mainly to hold on to the cash longer and get interest. Secondary thought was just poor old technology debt.

Something akin to hearing that payroll at a large company was a batch job dumping a ton of text files to a share or something and the bank slurped them up for direct deposit.

View on HN

Partially this is due to self interest - holding the cash longer and getting interest - but most of it is actually due to self protection. Small banks have less cushion to recover from fraud, have less people to process payments quickly, and generally lack technological sophistication. NACHA represents all of the various institutions, from JPM down to the First Bank of Your Hometown, so it has limited flexibility in adopting new things that increase cost/requirements.

This was my assumption as well. For any large company I've always assumed refund times were 100% based around earning interest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com