" but if you took your cash to a post office or the clearing service teller (not to a bank!) the funds would go within 30 minutes. "

We still have that, but it is not connected to banks. Those payment centers are entering into a computer the account number and depositing your check (or cc). It is most analagous to a bank remote deposit that the agent is making on behalf of the utility company.

I do not know how actual bank transfer payments to utilities could even work at all. There would be no mechanism for transmitting the account or other information necessary to identify the customer. That is why pull works when the utility pulls from my account, but I do not know how push could ever work without a massive revamping of the entire banking system.


>>There is no such thing as electronic bill payment between banks and vendors in the U.S., with very few exceptions. The reasons are clear: the sender would have to provide the recipient's bank routing and account number, and no recipient is going to do that. Additionally the recipient would need a way to understand what incoming funds were for which accounts.
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>>Sounds like you are a victim of misleading marketing. 'Scheduled electronic payment' sounds to you like the _payment_ is electronic. It is the _scheduling_ that is electronic. Thus they can claim there description is accurate.
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>>I had never thought about the fact that this sounds misleading, but now that you brought it up, I can see how it would be.
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>>Typically people here who want to automatically pay bills do it via the vendor; i.e. to pay the electric bill go to the electric company's website and setup an automatic withdrawal. They you provide them with your info, and you never see theirs.
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>>Think of it as push vs pull. The vendor is willing to pull from your account, but not willing to give you enough info for you to push to their account.
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>>Somebody who works at our electric company, Commonwealth Edison, told me bank sent checks are often late and they encourage people to never use them for that reason.
>
>Believe it or not, we had electronic payments here 18 years ago. Business to business mostly, but if you took your cash to a post office or the clearing service teller (not to a bank!) the funds would go within 30 minutes. From the office, we could track (via dialup) the state of our accounts within minutes - we'd call someone to remind them of a past due payment, and they'd check their account, agree to pay, hang up. Ten minutes later, we saw the money on our account. That was possible because we had this centralized clearing service, which was crazy good in that respect. It also meant that the tax authorities could peek at will, which they rarely did because they didn't want to touch the wasp's nest :). But there were some checks - like you couldn't pass a payroll to your workers' bank accounts until it was validated for social, health and other taxes being paid as well in the same batch.
>
>And then they dismantled this service and... well I don't do business here anymore so I have no clue, but the payments now go through banks, so instead of one single b2b transaction now it's three - your bank pulls from your account, sends to the other bank, they pass it to the recipient's account. Back then I remember hungarian banks guaranteed that such a transaction would pass within a fortnight... I guess the banks are just as swift as this clearing service once was, just because they are seriously competitive here. But that's just a guess - the first axiom of the universe is that the banks will always invent yet another reason to hold on to your money for an extra day and charge you for it.