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Faster Transfers Beta (US only)
- zx2c4 12y agoHow does this work?
- jhoon 12y agoStripe 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 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 been added. (I work at Stripe.)
- zx2c4 12y agoI 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?
- oroup 12y agoWild 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.
- dangrossman 12y agoThis is how most businesses have been funded for the past 30+ years AFAIK. Merchant account transactions are batched and settled nightly, then ACH'd to the merchant the next day. You get the money 1-3 banking days after charging someone. Stripe was the exception to the norm, and now they're doing what everyone else does. Holding onto your money before transferring it to you is something other merchant account providers only do on a case-by-case basis for accounts they consider at high risk for fraud.
- matthewarkin 12y agoI got an email like 2 weeks ago saying I was auto-enrolled in the two day transfer. I guess I'm just special where I don't have to fill out beta signups?
- tibbon 12y agoThis 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 than happy to just be fine with things being slow. Paypal has been around how long, and they don't seem to be pushing for it to go faster. This doesn't seem to be a problem bound to Moore's Law or the speed of the internet, just something that needs to be taken care of.
- smackfu 12y agoIsn't this 7-day hold just an internal Stripe policy though? The new faster transfers are just the normal ACH speed.
- jhoon 12y agoYou'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)
- praxeologist 12y agoI don't see why Square can start the ball rolling the next day but you need anything near 7 days delay. I figured it was just a way to make more money.
- tibbon 12y agoThe 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...
- pbiggar 12y agoGot an email from Stripe about this this morning. Our accountant was ecstatic!
- ceejayoz 12y agoAs a non-accountant, why? Doesn't this mean a single infusion of five days worth of transfers and then back to a transfer-a-day coming into the account?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- zabaki 12y agoEU is currently working on changing that, inside eu at least. Their proposal can be read here: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2013/0264(COD)&l=en http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?...
- zabaki 12y agoActually just read a few talks by danes in the financial council in Denmark. They are currently reconstructing the entire payment infrastructure to allows realtime transfers of payments. For payments under $100.000, transfers are done three times a day, as is seen with services such as MobilePay (Venmo wannabe) that i believe are considered a e-money institution. If anyone is interested then i can provide the links to the slides. They are, however, in danish.
- unfunco 12y agoNot to sound pedantic, but three times a day is not realtime. In the United Kingdom at least, transferring money from one bank account to another at the same bank is instant (pretty much sub-second) transaction and from one bank account to another at a different bank is generally processed within fifteen minutes, nearly all UK banks support Faster Payments[0]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service
- zabaki 12y agoYoure right. Real time tranaction is simply what The bankers here in denmark called it. Shows the level of mis-mash between expectations from consumers and the financial sector (in my country at least)
- ulfw 12y agoI 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.
- seanmccann 12y agoWire transfers in the United States are immediate as well. This has nothing to do with wire transfers.
- ajtaylor 12y agoThe last time I did a wire transfer in the US (admittedly a couple years ago now) it was anything but instant. IIRC there was a lot of manual work that had to be done behind the scenes to complete the transaction. And you have to do into a branch to do it as well - no internet banking!
- mitchellh 12y agoIts all about risk. My accounts are cleared to do small wire transfers instantly. But when I received a wire over $100,000 once, it took about 24 hours to verify before clearing. From what I've heard from bankers I've asked about this, they said that wire transfers are indeed instant, but the banks (on either end or both) may hold the transfer for any reason they want.
- sim0n 12y agoI've sent many wires online before in the US. They were definitely not instant and took up to a few days to clear but could be sent online.
- ulfw 12y agoExactly what I meant. I have done many transfers in the US as well. I think the fastest was three days for me. The average more like 4-5 biz days (which ended up being a whole week as the weekend was in between).
- notastartup 12y agoWhat about Canada? Seems like we live on the same region yet we are always left out.
- akanet 12y agoI just signed up for the beta and was approved in about ~15m. It's not material to my business but still cool to see Stripe improving the experience across the board.