No more waiting for payments at weekends: Banks shift to seven-day processing

Tuesday, 11 April 2023

You won’t have to wait until Monday for some of this to arrive in your bank account.

There’s welcome news for anyone who spent the long weekend waiting for a bank transaction to be processed – as of next month, transactions will happen seven days a week.

From May 26, transactions in New Zealand dollars between all of New Zealand’s participating banks will be processed every day. Participating banks are ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Bank of China, ICBC, Citi, HSBC, Kiwibank, TSB and Westpac.

The Co-Operative Bank and SBS are not members of Payments NZ but are also making the change.

Payments include credit card, debit card, automatic payments, bill payments, direct debit or direct credit transactions.

At the moment, payments only move on “business days”.

* Consumers 'data rights' law to smash banks' stranglehold

* Overcharged Afterpay customers frustrated with delays in being refunded money

Ben Lynch is the founder of Dolla, a new domestic phone app that allows people to make direct payments to small businesses, like cafes, at a fraction of the cost of the Visa and Mastercard payments system.

Steve Wiggins, chief executive of Payments NZ said payments had only been processed Monday to Friday as a historic thing from when banks only opened and operated on business days.

“This is more of a decision of ‘let’s move that to seven days a week including public holidays as well’.”

He said small businesses would probably benefit because they could receive payments at the weekend, and some people might be able to be paid for their work at weekends rather than waiting until Monday.

“It will be interesting to see how organisations and the public respond, what behavioural change happens and how that impacts the flow of funds through the system. It’s a case of wait and see but it will be fascinating.”

He said banks had had to make changes to their systems. “For a lot of banks, the business day definition has tended to be a bit hardwired in – both at the central bank and retail banks, as well. There’s been a lot of change, although it sounds straightforward it never tends to be. It has been a big job for the industry to enable that capability and put the operational support in behind it as well.”

He said it would mean teams of people working seven days a week to make sure payments were processed properly, as opposed to five days previously.

“It’s a good and positive change but not insignificant.”

He said banks would be communicating with their customers about what it would mean. People with direct debits set up would need to be aware of the days they were going to be processed so they were not caught out, he said.

Payments will still be settled between banks every 30 to 60 minutes, 16 hours a day