OT: Banking oddity

Perhaps just the result of a slightly odd algorithm - perhaps it reduces your displayed balance by the uncleared amount, but rounds that down to whole pounds.

I might be interesting to try paying in two cheques on the same day, and see if the the balance is reduced by the sum of the pence, or pence of the sum.

-- Richard

It got odder. Somewhere between 10:00 and 15:00 the whole amount of the cheque got added, the balance was then yy pence too high!

This morning it's back to being right.

It's not long since the balance only ever changed overnight. I assume some ancient mainframe batch system is still definitive and the whizzy internet-and-app stuff runs on top and tries to extrapolate from the previous overnight balance and how it assumes the transactions since then will be processed. And then isn't always right.

It's still a bit concerning that something so critical isn't always spot on.

nib

AIUI that's how it works. The mainframe is still batch-processing overnight, and modern things like Faster Payments are UIs that make it look like things have happened instantly, but the mainframe is still doing a reconciliation later. That's how things like fraudulent transactions made today can be easily reversed, because they haven't actually committed to the ledger yet.

I wonder if it's something like they OCR the cheques, and the OCR is reliable at reading ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY NINE POUNDS but not 73p (could be

Theo

I don't think the issue is the Mainframe, its more likely to be the "new" paying in system. From a recent conversation with a cashier in Barclays their paying-in system photographs the cheques and the image is then checked later in the day and the account adjusted.

Its like everything else in this world, make it snazzy not accurate... ... oh and whilst the software running on the "Mainframe" might have been written in Cobol half a century ago the box it runs on will usually be a modern IBM "Z" system, with 64-bit 5.5Ghz Telum II processors with

Dave