Comment by kccqzy
3 days ago
I am convinced that this is in some cases a pro-consumer behavior. A credit card company once pulled money from my bank via ACH due to the automatic payment feature I set up, but that bank account didn't have enough money in it. The bank sent me at least two emails about the situation. I finally noticed that second email and wired myself more money from a different account. The credit card company didn't notice anything wrong and didn't charge any late fees or payment returned fees. The bank didn't charge any overdraft fees or insufficient funds fees. And the wire transfer didn't have a fee due to account balance. (Needless to say, from then on I no longer juggle multiple bank accounts like that.)
The bank had an opportunity to notify me precisely because ACH is not real time. And I had an opportunity to fix it because wire transfers is almost real time (finishes in minutes not days). I appreciate it when companies pull money from my account I get days of notice but if I need to move money quickly I can do it too.
In most cases it's definitely better for it to be fast. For example I sold a buggy face to face today and they paid me by bank transfer, and the reason we could do that was that I had a high confidence it would turn up quickly and they weren't trying to scam me. It actually took around 1 second which is really quite fast.
You don't need slow transfers to get an opportunity to satisfy automatic payments. I don't know how it works but in the UK direct debits (an automatic "take money from my account for bills" system) gives the bank a couple of days notice so my banking app warns me if I don't have enough money. Bank transfers are still instant.