Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

https://support.stripe.com/questions/how-can-i-get-my-funds-transferred-faster-than-seven-days

by jhoon • 12 years ago

47 39 12 years ago

support.stripe.com

zx2c42• 12 years ago

How does this work?

jhoon2• 12 years ago

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 been added.

(I work at Stripe.)

zx2c42• 12 years ago

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?

matthewarkin• 12 years ago

I 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?

tibbon3• 12 years ago

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 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.

smackfu2• 12 years ago

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

jhoon2• 12 years ago

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)

tibbon3• 12 years ago

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...

spellboots• 12 years ago

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?

gambiting• 12 years ago

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

tibbon3• 12 years ago

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

DrJokepu• 12 years ago

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.

seanmccann3• 12 years ago

It all comes down to risk. The longer they can sit on the money, the less risk. Stripe's entire business revolves around risk management, hence why it's 7 days, which is longer than others (their banking partners).

jlees• 12 years ago

Is this the only reason bank transfers take so much longer in the US than UK? Why are UK banks happy to take the risk? (I'm genuinely curious and don't know much about why the US is slower.)

pbiggar• 12 years ago

Got an email from Stripe about this this morning. Our accountant was ecstatic!

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

As 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?

zabaki3• 12 years ago

EU 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?...

zabaki3• 12 years ago

Actually 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• 12 years ago

Not 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

zabaki3• 12 years ago

Youre 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)

ulfw3• 12 years ago

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.

seanmccann3• 12 years ago

Wire transfers in the United States are immediate as well. This has nothing to do with wire transfers.

ajtaylor• 12 years ago

The 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!

notastartup2• 12 years ago

What about Canada? Seems like we live on the same region yet we are always left out.

akanet• 12 years ago

I 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.

Faster Transfers Beta (US only)

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