I have always been impressed at the speed of financial transactions in Europe. Since SMS became a thing, I have watched in amazement, how people have been buying cars, houses, other goods, transferring money, with their cell phones. It all happens 'instantly.' Meanwhile, when we send money from bank to bank, or to Europe, or UK, it takes 3 days, or more!
Surely, it is set up by the system to collect interest during that time period? Multiply by thousands, millions transactions, that is a lot of interest collected.
Well... here in Europe the EU parliament passed laws that created the unified payment area (SEPA) as a first step and then forced the banks to offer overnight transfers. The current aim is instant payments, especially to reduce the dominance of Paypal.
you'd collect interest on money you loaned out. they'd have to be loaning out some amount of money, and even if it's just 'backed up' by all this 'inflight' money, that's not terribly safe. I think the majority of the slowness is just down to old/legacy systems, and the sheer volume of stuff that has to be touched to make upgrades. I'm not saying upgrades/changes never happen, but it's a big effort. Why do we still have relatively poor security around a lot of financial stuff? Because the cost of just writing off fraud is still usually much cheaper than the long-term effort of systemic upgrades.
Other countries didn't have as much infrastructure to upgrade, and have been able to leap frog the US in many ways.
