Why are interbank payment (settlement) systems closed for weekends and holidays?
"The second part of your question is the easiest to answer, how much manual work is involved in settlement processes? Payment systems which handle low value (i.e. high volume) transactions work on the basis of net settlement. Each of the individual payments are netted across all of the participant banks, so that only one ""real"" payment is made by each bank. Some days banks will receive money, others they will pay money. This is arbitrary and depends on whether their outbound payments exceed their inbound payments for that day.   The payment system will notify each Bank how much it owes/will receive for the day. The money is then transferred between all of the banks simultaneously by the payment system to remove the risk that some pay and others don't. If you're going to make or receive a very large payment, you're going to want to make certain that its correct. This means that if there's a discrepancy, you need operations people available to find out why its wrong.   When dealing with this many payments, answering that question can be hard. Did we miss a payment? Is there a duplicate? Etc.  The vast majority of payments will process without any human involvement, but to make the process work, you always need human brains there to fix problems that occur. This brings me to your first question. On every day that settlement happens, a bank will receive (or pay) a very large sum of money. As a settlement bank you must settle that money - the guarantee that every bank will pay is one of the main reasons these systems exist. For settlement to happen, every bank has to agree to participate, and be ready to verify the data on their side and deliver the funds from their account. So there is no particular reason that this doesn't happen on weekends and holidays other than history. But for any payment system to change, it would require the support of (at least) a majority of participants to pay staff to manage the settlement process on weekends. This would increase costs for banks, but the benefits would only really be for you and me (if at all). That means it's unlikely to happen unless a government forces the issue." TARGET2 is a high value realtime settlement system across Europe and for this to be open on weekends would mean all the Banks including Central Banks in the Euro Zone work. Quite a few times to manage intra day liquidity, banks borrow from each other, hence there is an active monitering of the liquidity by Banks. The borrowing happens over phone and fax and the lending bank sending a high value transaction that credits the borrowing banks. These is the day to day job of treasury group [highly paid individuals] to manage liquidity. Now if on weekends the volume is less, it does not make sense to keep these people, the cost of supporting this for very insiginificant business gain is not driving to build such systems.  On the other hand on retail transactions, say Cards [Debit / Credit], ATM, the value is not high and hence there is no treasury function involved and there is a huge need, everything is automated. So no issues.
"Members of the Federal Reserve System keep track of what money a bank has (if it's not in the vault), who owns what shares of stock, who owns what bond, etc. The part of the Federal Reserve System that tracks stock ownership is the Depository Trust Company (DTC). They have a group of subsidiaries that settle various types of security transactions. DTC is a member of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, a limited-purpose   trust company under New York State banking law and a registered   clearing agency with the Securities and Exchange Commission. There's lots of information on their website describing this process. DTCC's subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company (DTC), established in   1973, was created to reduce costs and provide clearing and settlement   efficiencies by immobilizing securities and making ""book-entry""   changes to ownership of the securities. DTC provides securities   movements for NSCC's net settlements1, and settlement for institutional   trades (which typically involve money and securities transfers between   custodian banks and broker/dealers), as well as money market   instruments. Black pools are trades done where the price is not shared with the market. But the DTC is the one who keeps track of who owns which shares. They have records of all net transactions2. The DTC is the counterparty for transactions. When stock moves from one entity to another the DTC is involved. As the central counterparty for the nation's major exchanges and   markets, DTCC clears and settles virtually all broker-to-broker equity 1. This is the link that shows that settlements are reported on a ""net basis"". 2. If broker A sells 1000 shares of something to broker B at 8 and then five minutes later broker B sells the 1000 shares back to A, you cannot be sure that that total volume will be recorded. No net trading took place and there would be fees to pay for no reason if they reported both trades. Note: In dark pool trading quite often the two parties don't know each other. For shares (book-keeping records) to be exchanged it has to be done through a Clearing House." TOCOM Crude is a cash-settled blend of Oman and Dubai crude oil, both quoted in USD.  The daily settlement price is mark to market, but the final settlement price is based on reported prices from Dubai and Oman (or calculated in some cases with a known procedure), averaged and then converted to Yen using monthly average exchange rates as published by a reference bank (see Detailed Rules) You're trying to go all the way back and unfuddle quotes into a blend of USD-quoted oils.  The correct procedure here would be to go with the Oman and Dubai prices in the first place (unless you're trying to arbitrage the TOCOM market). As to why they do it this way?  It's a service.  TOCOM takes on all the challenges to provide customers with a steady and consistent way of trading cash-oil.  For physical oil, all you'd have to do is buy the blend on Dubai's and Oman's spot market.  You trust TOCOM's price finding process, i.e. there will be no discrepancies between your TOCOM cash-oil and the Middle East physical oil. Edit: As to why Japan isn't buying WTI directly:  There's a considerable cost of carry.  WTI delivery location is Cushing, OK; there are pipelines but it's still a logistics act to get the oil to a port on the West Coast and then have it shipped to Japan.  Dubai's delivery is at Jebel Ali (Persian Gulf), Omani crude can be shipped straight from Mina Al Fahal.  Not only is it a shorter trip but also there are more shipping companies specialised in oil deliveries to the Asian hotspots. Why they pay in USD?  Persian oil is highly sought after in nearly all of Asia's economies but there's little other exported goods from there.  So naturally the market for currency crosses (AEDJPY, OMRJPY, AEDINR, OMRINR, etc.) is not that liquid.  At least not as liquid as to make buying Persian oil a smooth deal.  Anyway, both Dubai and Oman chose to follow Western practice to quote their contracts in USD and (maybe because of liquidity concerns) also to accept USD for payment only. "Wow!  Look at that job description:  &gt; ■ Job: Sleeping  &gt; ■ Location: Akihabara (3 min walk from station)  &gt; ■ Qualifications: High school age to 30s  &gt; ■ Compensation: 3,500 yen/hour  &gt; ■ Hours: Weekdays 15:00-22:00, Weekend/holidays 12:00-22:00  At today's exchange rate, that's $44.48 / hour to sleep.  Sounds like my dream job.  Of course, you also have to be a pretty girl to qualify.  I'll just have to wait until they open up a ""sleep with a fat old guy"" boutique shop.  Then I'm moving to Japan." "Why do online services ask for all those CVV codes and expiration date information, if, whenever you poke the card out of your wallet, all of its information becomes visible to everyone in the close area? What can I do to secure myself? I'd guess that's to protect the card company, not you.  The number of the card is guessable, but each other bit of information makes it much harder to guess (the CVV code makes it ~1000 times harder, the expiration date makes it about 50-100 times harder).  Since you wouldn't be responsible for the payment anyway, adding security for online transactions provides the company with less liability. As for the security of your information online, that's trickier. It depends entirely on the site you're using whether they've implemented the appropriate security measures or not (and, given the SSL attacks we've seen, even that might not help).  (source: I'm a web developer, and have worked on payments systems before that implemented the security mandated by the cards).  At the very least never, ever type in your information on a non-https site (there's normally a little ""lock"" icon that will display if you're on HTTPS instead of HTTP)." "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2017/09/29/Interconnectedness-of-Global-Systemically-Important-Banks-and-Insurers-45223) reduced by 58%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Interconnectedness among global systemically important banks and global systemically important insurers has important financial stability implications.  &gt; This paper examines connectedness among United States, European and Asian GSIBs and GSIIs, using publicly-available daily equity returns and intra-day volatility data from October 2007 to August 2016.  &gt; Lastly, the paper demonstrates significant influence of economic policy uncertainty and U.S. long-term interest rates on total connectedness among systemically important institutions, and the important role of bank profitability and asset quality in driving bank-specific return connectedness.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/73blof/imfinterconnectedness_of_global/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~219245 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **connectedness**^#1 **important**^#2 **among**^#3 **paper**^#4 **GSIBs**^#5" "Thanks for the reply man. Yeah it literally says ""closed"" next to the accou t name. But we finally got ahold of someone, I guess they close your account whenever you have $0 in it and the account should open again 1-2 business days after the direct deposit tries to go into her account. At least that's what the lady said.   She hates this bank but we live in a small town and there's just not many options in terms of banking here.  Thanks for the help though man I appreciate it!" The experience I have with wire transfers is from Australia to the US. These transfers can take up to 5 business dates (i.e. a whole week including the non-business days of the weekend). I would have thought intra-European transfers would be quicker, given how behind most US (regional) banks are in their electronic transfers. However, I don't think you should be worried just yet. In the united states, they may request a check written by the bank to the other party. I have had to make large payments for home settlements, or buying a car. If the transaction was over a specified limit, they wanted a cashiers check. They wanted to make sure it wouldn't bounce.  I have had companies rebate me money, and say the maximum value of the check was some small value. I guess that was to prevent people from altering the check. One thing that has happened to me is that a large check I wanted to deposit was held for a few extra days to make sure it cleared. I wouldn't have access to the funds until the deadline passed.