Do High Street Banks Take The Weekend Off?

Belly

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Belly

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For the life of me I can't understand why high street banks use working days as apposed to total days. Do computers take weekends and public holidays off, just like the rest of us?

I remember years ago when working in finance I needed statements on the 7th, 14th, 21st and the last day of each month. When I approached Lloyds Bank, the nominated bank, they said that they couldn't provide those statements because those days could occur on weekends and public holidays. However, I could have statements on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd Mondays to Fridays and one at the end of the month.

On Friday I paid a cheque (remember those?) into my local bank and the lady said because it's a bank holiday weekend the funds won't be available until Wednesday, normally it would be Tuesday!

Can anyone on these forums support the bank's position and an explanation of why they do it?

Computer says No!
 
I imagine the banks can make more money this way. Although nationwide will take my mortgage payments on a weekend from my account but Direct Debit's still seem to be a 'working week' thing. I'll be the technology is there now but probably a throw back to the days when things had to be done manually.

I bet if this situation cost the banks money they would be quick enough to modernise.
 
I suspect banks like having a weekend where they can do things like computer maintenance overnight (Barclays for example seem to try and do their maintenance that affects online banking at about 1am on a saturday or sunday), so yes computers can take the weekend off.

Traditionally it would have been because most offices and many businesses didn't open on a Saturday and basically none opened on a Sunday so why would the bank need to be open, many businesses also had a "half day" which seems to have varied by town/region, I remember some of my local shops closing at about 1pm on a Thursday I think it was.
 
Werewolf said:
I suspect banks like having a weekend where they can do things like computer maintenance overnight (Barclays for example seem to try and do their maintenance that affects online banking at about 1am on a saturday or sunday), so yes computers can take the weekend off.

Traditionally it would have been because most offices and many businesses didn't open on a Saturday and basically none opened on a Sunday so why would the bank need to be open, many businesses also had a "half day" which seems to have varied by town/region, I remember some of my local shops closing at about 1pm on a Thursday I think it was.
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But if I buy something from an online retailer using my debit card or withdraw cash from an ATM on a weekend and then immediately check my statement online the money will have been debited. So perhaps the computer is a bit choosey as to what work it does on the weekend? :-)
 
It's tied in with traditions, no work and church on Sunday etc, I think Britain used to be much bigger in church going.

Another question, why does it still take 3 days to clear anything, it's all electronic nowadays?
 
It's because banking tech has stagnated. There's been zero incentive for banks to update their systems, they know they had us over a barrel and could do whatever they wanted and we had no choice but to use them and their antiquated technologies. Bankers are more interested in their next bonus than customer satisfaction or keeping with the times.


The likes of Starling however have certainly upset their monopoly and they're starting to feel the heat. It's why with some banks you can now freeze your card with an app, see your spending, etc. All features brought to us thanks to Fintech companies. It's all a facade obviously, the tech running the banks is still rooted in the 90s but the fact they're trying is testament to how well the Fintech companies are doing. Sadly for me it's too little, too late. The banks have had their run, they milked us for whatever they could whilst doing the absolute bare minimum to appease us and they know it.


I will never open another high street bank account again.
 
Diddums said:
It's because banking tech has stagnated. There's been zero incentive for banks to update their systems, they know they had us over a barrel and could do whatever they wanted and we had no choice but to use them and their antiquated technologies. Bankers are more interested in their next bonus than customer satisfaction or keeping with the times.


The likes of Starling however have certainly upset their monopoly and they're starting to feel the heat. It's why with some banks you can now freeze your card with an app, see your spending, etc. All features brought to us thanks to Fintech companies. It's all a facade obviously, the tech running the banks is still rooted in the 90s but the fact they're trying is testament to how well the Fintech companies are doing. Sadly for me it's too little, too late. The banks have had their run, they milked us for whatever they could whilst doing the absolute bare minimum to appease us and they know it.


I will never open another high street bank account again.
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Never heard of starling, what are the pros/cons?
 
Diddums said:
It's because banking tech has stagnated. There's been zero incentive for banks to update their systems, they know they had us over a barrel and could do whatever they wanted and we had no choice but to use them and their antiquated technologies. Bankers are more interested in their next bonus than customer satisfaction or keeping with the times.

.
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It's more that the regulations they have to follow and the size and inter-connectivity of their systems means that they cannot make a lot of changes to their systems to make them "more efficient" or whatever without massive amounts of testing.
The average bank has quite large numbers of systems (possibly hundreds) that all have to work together flawlessly and are often based on things that have been added to other legacy systems as needed, and the industry goes for reliability and resilience over speed or change. A few days of unexpected downtime for a forum, or even a retailer is annoying and possibly expensive, but if that happens to a bank when it makes a change it can result in massive disruption, as I believe a few found out a couple of years back when one of the banks tried to move it's infrastructure to a new system and ended up with customers, businesses and even their own branches unable to do anything.

A new bank can be more flexible than an older established one in some ways, if just because when it comes to IT it'll be starting with a fresh slate, rather than needing to keep comparability with a host of systems that can have their roots in the 60's.

It's like the aerospace industry, change tends to be slow because you really, really, really want to know that what you're doing isn't going to crash an aircraft and kill hundreds (hello Boeing), or in the case of banking result in your customers not having any access to their money for weeks whilst you try and repair the damage the change has done, and catch up on all the transactions that are now outstanding.
 
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Eurofighter said:
If they wanted they could do it. We need more competition and regulation.
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You willing to pay for normal banking?

The systems frequently cost hundreds of millions and changes have to work flawlessly with not just the banks own backbone, but every ancillary system they use and they connect to, and they have to do it for hundreds of millions of transactions per day, every day.

IIRC updating just the one system can and does take years and cost not inconsiderable fortunes, and even then it can go wrong, so the banks tend to stick with the same systems for years and update slowly so they don't break everything at once.

Personally I prefer reliable and possibly a bit slow, over flashy and broken.
 
Since Covid a lot of high street banks and building societies are using that as an excuse to not open on a Saturday and cut down further their already stingy weekday opening hours. Making it impossible to visit if you work a normal 9-5 week.
 
Also the Fintech banks, don't have the debt laden down by mortgages, and loans, that the traditional banks do. So all their money goes into the flashy things. Again that is slowly changing, but when they first started they couldn't provide overdrafts, as they were not able to provide loans & lending services. So they have excelled at just one function of a traditional bank.
 
Most significant functional changes are applied over a weekend. But there are other routine maintenance items that also need to happen at weekends. For example Windows and Linux patching, database maintenance, etc.
 
Diddums said:
It's because banking tech has stagnated. There's been zero incentive for banks to update their systems, they know they had us over a barrel and could do whatever they wanted and we had no choice but to use them and their antiquated technologies. Bankers are more interested in their next bonus than customer satisfaction or keeping with the times.


The likes of Starling however have certainly upset their monopoly and they're starting to feel the heat. It's why with some banks you can now freeze your card with an app, see your spending, etc. All features brought to us thanks to Fintech companies. It's all a facade obviously, the tech running the banks is still rooted in the 90s but the fact they're trying is testament to how well the Fintech companies are doing. Sadly for me it's too little, too late. The banks have had their run, they milked us for whatever they could whilst doing the absolute bare minimum to appease us and they know it.


I will never open another high street bank account again.
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It's not quite that simple.

I was involved in a platform change for a massive card processor.

What you have to know, is that many systems are antiquated and the institutions know this.

The problem is, so many sticking plasters and workarounds have been built into and onto systems that even speccing upgrades is a huge amount of work, replacing systems will take literally years and many screw ups, IME.
 
Belly said:
On Friday I paid a cheque (remember those?) into my local bank and the lady said because it's a bank holiday weekend the funds won't be available until Wednesday, normally it would be Tuesday!
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You could have used the cheque deposit feature on the app, funds get processed much quicker.
 
The Fintech challengers have a massive advantage as they have been able to build things from the ground up. There is a lot more risk in messing around with established and/or vendor-supplied solutions.

As mentioned before, you'd be horrified at how old some of the systems running in a lot of modern banks are now. You're talking a timeframe of several years for big migrations in many cases.

It's nice that we're seeing some of the modern features come along though. Nationwide meet my needs for my main account but I use Starling for spending which is ace.
 
LeeUK said:
Starling's whole bank is on a Amazon cloud system in Dublin.
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Yeah I went to their seminar where they explained how they'd built it all from the ground up along with their security modelling. Really smart stuff.
 
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