What's going on CBA?!

[LewisM]

Wife and I own and run rental property. Our tenants all pay via direct deposit into our bank accounts. 2 use CBA, the rest use ANZ, Suncorp or Westpac.

We have had no delays up till the last month. All the others come through overnight (they all pay on Friday), but recently the 2 with CBA have taken 6 days to go in. Both sent screen shots showing when sent. This has happened 4 times per tenant, all April.

Has CBA undertaken a new weird interbank policy? Our bank maintains nothing on their end has changed.

[glend]

The banks have a set period of time in which they have to clear funds and normally this is expressed in working days - Saturday and Sunday, public holidays etc don't count. If your tenant is paying on Friday the overnight batch processing won't handle it until early AM on Saturday. Some banks purposely delay crediting these funds to the destination account until the last possiible date, especially if the funds are destined for another bank.. These funds are held in bank treasury mgt accounts and they are 'placed' on the overnight money market in order to make trading income on your funds. There is techinally nothing illegal in this practice. It was worse with cheque credits which has paper processing delays allowed even though banks processed the checks every night. How do I know this? I was a senior manager at the State Bank of NSW for over a decade, managed all the bank interchange infrastructure, and sat on the Eftpos Gateway Banks technical commjttee. It's standard practice. Check the tems and conditions, its the fine print and they are right nothing has changed they have just decided to exercise their discretion over these funds.
Banks have regular reporting periods, typically quarterly. Westpac reported to the stock market today. April may not be a coincidence if CBA Treasury needed to boost its income contribution to the company results, its simple to drag out the decretionary use of those funds on the market.


This same practice is used by Paypal. If you pay via Paypal they take the money immeadiately from your bank account via debit, but do not credit the sellers account for five working days. During that period Paypal treasury operation will use that money on the market to make money from it.