Setting a car loan

[R. Victor Klassen]

On Feb 21, 2015, at 7:12 PM, Edward Doolittle <edward.doolittle at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> Perhaps my experience is peculiar to Canada. I've never understood, for
> instance, why electronic banking in Canada can't just go on during weekends
> and holidays, and why it could take 3 business days (which could be 6
> days!) for my electronic bill payments to arrive, even though they depart
> instantaneously. I imagine some wizened old bankers in the basement
> printing out my payment requests and dropping them in a pneumatic tube ...
> 

It is not peculiar to Canada.  In fact it is peculiar to your institution.  Before I moved back from the US a few years ago, the bank had a variable (but published) number of days, which they guaranteed - meaning they paid any overdue fees if they failed to keep the guarantee.   The number of days depended on how they were linked to the recipient.  In the worst case they would actually mail the payment - saving me the stamp, and possibly saving themselves a little in processing fees, as their payment draft was guaranteed scannable by the automated systems.  In the best case it would be next day - or maybe even same day (likely if the recipient was their client).  In this way they permitted me to pay ANYONE, provided I could give them a valid address.   I suspect that if the recipient was an institution - not an individual or small business - and the bank didn’t have a relationship with them, they might attempt to establish one, or learn the routing to make it entirely electronic if they had enough transfers to the same recipient.

Now I am back in Canada and the Credit Union (and I expect most/all in Ontario) allows me to electronically pay only bills from a list of their making.  But payments may be made instantly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including holidays.

Email transfer can go to anyone, and provided they have an account with a participating institution, it is as fast as you can send email, and the recipient read it and sign onto their internet banking account.  But I believe there is a charge to the sender for this service - little or no opportunity for the bank to make money on the funds in transit.