Does your bank pay interest on a weekend?

Milarky

This is all covered pretty comprehensively in a couple of long running discussions on the Stoozing.com boards [or is that boreds?]

Basically it cuts both ways. Before Faster Payments no one would have been affected since payments only ever reached the banks concerned on a working day (like standing order payments are still restricted to being sent on a working day now) The advent of D-I-Y faster payments has brought this out (I noticed it myself in 2010)

'5 Day' banks:

Natwest RBS Ulsterbank [I assume]: ensure payments sent before 6:30pm Monday to Friday - excluding Bank Holidays

Lloyds and Halifax: update around midnight M-F ex BH. Weekend credits move forward to Monday as stated in article. [Of course withdrawals of credit balances skip dates as well!]

Barclays: also 6:30pm M-F ex BH

'6' Day Banks:

Nationwide: 8:30 pm (sharp) M-F and 8:30pm Saturday

Santander: 8:15 pm (ish) M - F and same time Saturday

'All week' Banks:

HSBC [assume] First Direct: 7 days a week [M-F plus weekends]. Some report 11:45 is their cutoff - so can probably regard that as 'midnight' anyway.

Tesco Bank: Follows HSBC times mostly: M-F no cut off before midnight but appears to cutoff at 6pm on Saturday. But date then moves to Sunday instead of Monday!

OLDBOY

I am going to tell you a story how 'Does your bank pay interest on weekends' started.On Saturday 7th July 2012 I transferred a sum of money from my current account to my savings account using NatWest 24/7 online banking.Saturday both accounts showed transaction dates as 7th July and the balances updated to reflect these transfers.Monday 9th July looked at both accounts,transaction dates still showing 7th July.Tuesday 10th July looked at my accounts and the transaction dates had changed to 9th July,I could not believe my eyes and at first thought I had the early symptoms of dementia.I rang NatWest complaints team and explained what had happened and they wouldn't believe me.So the following Saturday I made a transfer from my current account to my savings account and printed out statements on Saturday,Sunday,Monday and Tuesday and sent these copies to NatWest.I received a call to say I was correct and that they would investigate and get back to me.This they did with the following reasons,the bank only works 5 days a week and the system is not live and only updates at the end of a working day i.e Monday to Friday.I did try to explain that NatWest say 24/7 online banking,I also mentioned that I thought once a transaction date showed on your statement,it was carved in stone and could not be changed. Unfortunately the person could not answer these questions,so I sent an email to Stephen Hester CEO RBS Group.This was answered by one of his staff saying that their technical people were aware of this problem but had no foreseeable plans to rectify.I then wrote to the Board of Directors asking them if they were away of these problems and that, First Direct,HSBC,Lloyds all operated live systems that recorded transactions and showed them on your statements Saturday,Sunday or any other day of the week including Bank Holidays and wasn't it about time that RBS/NatWest updated their system for the 21st century.I received a letter from the same member of staff as before to say basically that they didn't want to hear from me again.

innovate

OLDBOY wrote: »

I received a letter from the same member of staff as before to say basically that they didn't want to hear from me again.

I am not surprised, they are probably too exhausted from reading your letters.