No more waiting for payments at weekends starting May 26
Soon, customers won’t have to spend the weekend waiting for their bank transactions to be processed.
At the moment, payments move only on “business days.”
But from May 26, all transactions in New Zealand dollars, including credit card, debit card, automatic payments, bill payments, direct debit, or direct credit transactions, between participating banks ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Bank of China, CCB, Citi, HSBC, Kiwibank, TSB, and Westpac, will happen seven days a week, Stuff reported.
Steve Wiggins, chief executive of Payments NZ, said payments had only been processed Monday to Friday as a historic holdover from the time banks only 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,’” Wiggins said.
Small businesses were expected to benefit from the move because they could receive payments on the weekend. Some people, too, might be able to receive their pay for their work on 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,” Wiggins said. “It’s a case of wait and see, but it will be fascinating.”
He said banks had had to tweak 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,” Wiggins said. “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.”
The Payments NZ leader said the change meant teams of people would have to work seven days a week to ensure payments were processed properly, as opposed to five days previously.
“It’s a good and positive change but not insignificant,” Wiggins said.
Banks will be reaching out to their customers to inform them about what the change would mean. People with direct debits set up would need to know 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, Stuff reported.
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