In article ,
John Anderton writes:

Which bank do you use ? I've never had an electronic payment (from one
clearing bank to another) result in anything but a credit to the
recipient on the same day as the money disappears from my account.

Depends on the bank and the circumstances.
Barclays does same day between its own accounts. However, they
have recently had to add delays in some cases because of increasing
electronic banking fraud. IIRC, this is typically triggered by
transfers into accounts which are not known to be routinely used
for payments. The object is to prevent transfered money becoming
quickly untracable (e.g. being cashed) before the transfer can be
investigated and found to be fraudulent. Again, this was covered
on Radio 4's Money Programme a month or two back.

--
Andrew Gabriel