anyone work for a credit card company? - Techy question.

[phatmanace]

I work for a financial company in IT - I understand the need for batches, and I understand why things can't always be message driven and real-time... but..

Why does it take > 1 day to apply a payment to my credit card account? - I have Faster payment service on my bank account, which I know can transfer the money within a working day to another account (with another bank). when I use it to send cash to my credit card company, it seems to take days to apply to my balance.

presumably, they have an internal swift gateway that receives the messages from my account and applies the credit to my card - possibly in a daily batch - I just don't get why/how that takes days to do.


I'm genuinely curious
Cheers
-ace

[lightthefuse]

Back in the day, when I used to process these things on a daily basis, that would be because even if you paid cash said slips still had to go round the clearing system. The trouble with credit cards is most of these are hived-off divisions by themselves, therefore whilst technically possible to credit the funds the same day, in all honesty I reckon the clearing bank would dearly like to hold on to that cash for a day or two so as to generate interest on it. Precisely the same reason that without faster payments cheques take 3-7 days to clear. So, no technical reason apart from the generation of interest on your funds. Would love to be corrected by someone still in the game, I ended up swapping into yours and have just left a finance contract!