>>>I don't care how many ingenious ways they find to keep my money on their accounts for a day or two longer, so they can artificially increase their "cash on hand" report and thus claim larger money-emitting rights (i.e. loan capacity), slowing transactions down in this manner is soooooooo slllllooooooow. It's like the banks in Hungary in the nineties - every business was carrying wads of cash around, I actually never saw so much cash - because a bank payment would take a week, and that's from one's account to another's bank, then another week for the partner to actually get the money. Now with all these electronics, 15 years later it doesn't take 14 days, it takes 4 or 6?
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>>It isn't taking my payments 4 or 6 days.
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>>And this isn't Hungary in the nineties.
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>Nope, this 4-6 days was Virginia 2001-2002, and my credit union's website actually is intelligent enough to know in advance (probably judging by statistics or something) how many days in ahead of due date (!) should I schedule the payment. So it depends - for some, it's just two days ahead; for some it was still 5 days last time I checked - mid 2007. Maybe still is, I quit those - some obscure long distance phone company with decently low rates to Serbia, but with nasty billing department, always sending their bills in the nick of time, so my $5 long distance bill would grow to $10 or my international from, say, $30 to $35, which is why I ditched them.
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>Like I said, there's no system, only individual agreements. So you may just be lucky, dealing with entities that your bank knows. It's not a rule. There's no rule, except one: it depends.

True, there is no single agreement. Most of my check payments go to large institutions like utilities, phone companies, credit card companies (banks), and the like, and they all do rapid electronic processing these days.

I worked with a credit card processing company for a while and was surprised how fixated merchants are with cash flow. To a lot of them it makes a huge difference whether they get their money the next day or the day after. Most of these companies seemed to be doing pretty well, at least racking up a lot of credit card sales, but they acted like they were living hand to mouth.