On Sun, 07 Aug 2005 18:02:30 +0100, "Dave Plowman (News)"
wrote:

In article ,
John Anderton wrote:
There are sound reasons for the money disappearing from your account
immediately and not appearing (well at least for a day or two) in the
recipient's account. It's to do with the risk of a fraudster writing
multiple cheques when they've only got enough funds to cover one and
the time it takes to get the physical cheque from the recipient's
branch to your branch.

A letter posted first class here in London will get to Aberdeen the next
day. I can order goods from RS before 5pm and have then delivered before
noon the next day. Three clear working days after issue is taking the p**s
in this day and age.

Hence my comment about a day or two. It takes about that long to get
the cheques exchanged and scanned.

And multiple cheques isn't an issue. It would assume
everyone pays them in immediately.

It is an issue because such a situation typically involves two or more
banks (i.e. independent companies).

I've a feeling that many people think that "the banks" are some sort
of single entity so that, for example, Barclays has full knowledge and
control over all of NatWest's customers accounts and vice-versa.

If a fraudster writes lots of cheques on their NatWest account and
gives them to people who bank with several other banks then, once the
fraud has been discovered, NatWest will have to waste a substantial
amount of time and effort verifying the fraud and compensating the
other banks. This sort of thing isn't handled automatically because it
involves the transfer of money out of one company into another and the
proof of the fraud is held in several places (the cheques with the
other banks and the account balance with NatWest).

Computers and the internet have made banking much easier in some
respects but the back-end processing that goes on is still fairly
complicated, mainly for legal rather than practical reasons, which is
why comparing cheque clearing to first class post isn't really a fair
comparison,

Cheers,

John