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Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

support.stripe.com

11–20 of 41 posts

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#11
post #3

This is awesome, and I'm glad to see them innovating around it. I've scratched my head for years now around clearing time of payments and digital payment systems. It isn't like you have to load gold coins on a ship, or manually have people verifying checks these days. There's realistically little reason for the entire system to be so slow- except for the fact that it is. For years payment processors have been more th…

Not sure how PayPal could be faster - money is transferred instantly to my bank account after receiving it through PayPal. Is that a UK only thing?

Yes. In Poland it takes 3-4 days for the funds to actually arrive in my bank account when sent from paypal.

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#12
post #6
post #3

This is awesome, and I'm glad to see them innovating around it. I've scratched my head for years now around clearing time of payments and digital payment systems. It isn't like you have to load gold coins on a ship, or manually have people verifying checks these days. There's realistically little reason for the entire system to be so slow- except for the fact that it is. For years payment processors have been more th…

Isn't this 7-day hold just an internal Stripe policy though? The new faster transfers are just the normal ACH speed.

You're correct -- Stripe self-imposed the seven-day delay early in its development.

While we may have chosen the seven-day delay, there are still a number of real challenges in moving to a faster transfer schedule. For example, we need to make sure funds are received from our banking partners in time to transfer them to our users.

(I work at Stripe)

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#13
post #3

This is awesome, and I'm glad to see them innovating around it. I've scratched my head for years now around clearing time of payments and digital payment systems. It isn't like you have to load gold coins on a ship, or manually have people verifying checks these days. There's realistically little reason for the entire system to be so slow- except for the fact that it is. For years payment processors have been more th…

Not sure how PayPal could be faster - money is transferred instantly to my bank account after receiving it through PayPal. Is that a UK only thing?

Yea, in the US its a vague 3-5 days.

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#14
post #6
post #3

This is awesome, and I'm glad to see them innovating around it. I've scratched my head for years now around clearing time of payments and digital payment systems. It isn't like you have to load gold coins on a ship, or manually have people verifying checks these days. There's realistically little reason for the entire system to be so slow- except for the fact that it is. For years payment processors have been more th…

Isn't this 7-day hold just an internal Stripe policy though? The new faster transfers are just the normal ACH speed.

The standard ACH process however just seems slow. Maybe I've been playing with Crytocurrency too much, but it seems in the era of sub-millisecond stock trading... we should be able to figure out how to move $100 one account to another in 5 minutes or so...

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#15
post #3

This is awesome, and I'm glad to see them innovating around it. I've scratched my head for years now around clearing time of payments and digital payment systems. It isn't like you have to load gold coins on a ship, or manually have people verifying checks these days. There's realistically little reason for the entire system to be so slow- except for the fact that it is. For years payment processors have been more th…

Not sure how PayPal could be faster - money is transferred instantly to my bank account after receiving it through PayPal. Is that a UK only thing?

The kind of near-instant, cheap money transfer provided by the Faster Payments Service system in the UK is actually fairly uncommon elsewhere in the world. If PayPal still used BACS it would take 3 working days even in the UK for PayPal payments to clear on your bank account.

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#16
post #14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this 7-day hold just an internal Stripe policy though? The new faster transfers are just the normal ACH speed.

The standard ACH process however just seems slow. Maybe I've been playing with Crytocurrency too much, but it seems in the era of sub-millisecond stock trading... we should be able to figure out how to move $100 one account to another in 5 minutes or so...

Yeah, it's pretty terrible in an e-commerce context. Get a payment, wait seven days to see if it actually gets settled. The only auth you can do up front is that the numbers look correct.

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how PayPal could be faster - money is transferred instantly to my bank account after receiving it through PayPal. Is that a UK only thing?

Yea, in the US its a vague 3-5 days.

I don't understand why it has to be anything longer than 5 seconds, is there any reasonable explanation for this?

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#18
post #9
post #2

How does this work?

Stripe is trialling faster transfer schedules for US-based users, meaning you'll get your money in two business days instead of waiting one week. If you'd like to be part of the beta, you can visit https://manage.stripe.com/faster-us-transfers and if you're US-based, you'll automatically be registered to participate in the beta. We're incrementally adding users to the beta, so we'll let you know as soon as you've bee…

I should have written a more clear question. I read the page, and I understand that now you're doing two-day instead of seven-day transfers.

What I'm wondering is, "how is this possible?" How is Stripe now moving the money faster than before? What change made this possible? Did the stewards of the ACH system make a change that allows this? Is Stripe advancing funds ahead of time based on some kind of credit? Was the seven-day policy basically arbitrary before, and so changing it to two-day basically involves changing an integer somewhere in the codebase and updating documentation? Or is it something else happening at a different layer? More generally, what are the pieces at play in transferring money that influence transfer time? And which of these pieces has Stripe interacted with in order to transfer funds faster?

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#19
I just don't get why banking in the US is still so far behind. I recently did a wire transfer from Turkey to Germany between two people's accounts at two different banks. It settled in a mere morning. Same day.

Re: Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

#20
post #18
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stripe is trialling faster transfer schedules for US-based users, meaning you'll get your money in two business days instead of waiting one week. If you'd like to be part of the beta, you can visit https://manage.stripe.com/faster-us-transfers and if you're US-based, you'll automatically be registered to participate in the beta. We're incrementally adding users to the beta, so we'll let you know as soon as you've bee…

I should have written a more clear question. I read the page, and I understand that now you're doing two-day instead of seven-day transfers. What I'm wondering is, "how is this possible?" How is Stripe now moving the money faster than before? What change made this possible? Did the stewards of the ACH system make a change that allows this? Is Stripe advancing funds ahead of time based on some kind of credit? Was the…

Wild ass guess here: keep funds at all the major banks and do intra-bank transfers which are instant. We've considered something similar. You need enough cash to keep a pool at every bank large enough to cover transfers and you need a big enough customer base that the net flow into or out of your account at a particular bank is small enough that you can rebalance periodically.
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