But why? What makes the plumbing stop on weekends and holidays? Is this some kind of law of nature, or can it be fixed?
It seems silly that bank transactions, stock trades, purchases of insurance or anything like that requires human intervention. It's like an HTTP request requiring a human to put it through. Bonkers.
I don’t know all the reasons, it could involve regulators not wanting to be on call, or more likely, the businesses not wanting to be on call. I know that for lots of accounting related things, there used to be a need for downtime time to tally things up, and maybe that schedule carried over.
But overall, I would bet it’s just a low demand thing that isn’t worth it. Suppose you opened an exchange that was 24/7. Would the cost to trade on your exchange be sufficiently low to compete with the current exchanges with limited hours?
Technically, if you had a paper stock certificate, you could sell it or buy it, and if you had a bag of money, you could move it. But whether or not other people will help you is probably dependent on how much you can pay, which for 99.99% of people, is probably not worth it to just wait a couple days.
Think about real estate. It’s possible that you have a paper deed and draw up some documents and buy or sell it in 30 minutes, but the cost of something going wrong is so high that it makes sense to take a little time and use lawyers to double and triple check things.
Then I guess we have to question why those .01% of transactions need human intervention at all. It seem like .01% of requests to Google Search don't need human interaction, why does money, now that it's mostly just an entry in a database somewhere (or on its way to be)? If it's a matter of approvals, then those should be codified in rules that can be expressed in code. That may be difficult for laws, the general refrain being 'laws aren't code', but money transfer is just a list of rules, transactions, settlement dates and so on.
As a general guideline I have deleted the word “just” from my vocabulary when talking about anything engineering related. Doubly so when it’s a system used directly by humans. And double again when there are legacy systems involved that weren’t designed to have human judgement deleted from their operation.
Here’s a fun example of the complexity even when there are live humans in the loop. I’m Canadian. My client is Canadian. I sent him an invoice using QuickBooks with the option to pay using QuickBooks Payments. He pays the invoice sitting at the table with me and a transaction shows up in my books but no money in my bank account. That’s normal, it usually takes a few days to clear. A week passes and still no cash. I call QuickBooks and they provide me with an ACH tracing number; they tell me that they released the funds days ago. I call my own bank and provide them the tracing number, my bank tells me they have no record of that transaction ever coming to them. I call QuickBooks back and escalate. They insist that my bank screwed up and lost it and provide me with the same tracing number. At least after escalating I now have a direct line to a case manager at QB. Back and forth, back and forth, and eventually I get an email from a VP of Compliance at Chase Manhattan asking that I call them.
Now… I don’t do business with Chase. My client doesn’t do business with Chase. QuickBooks does business with Chase and Chase wants to talk to me about financing Iranian terrorists and FINCEN. Chase happily accepted the money from QB and gave them a receipt for it and then the money disappeared into a mysterious compliance department who, apparently, can’t legally tell me why I was flagged or what I can do to ensure this doesn’t happen again. But after a quick chat about my business and relationship with my client the money magically showed up in my bank account.
Because with transactions things have to match and sometimes data errors happen.
Take something really simple like a bank cash transfer. Do you really think that no one ever accidentally puts in a typo in an account number or an amount?
If that happens then the transaction either fails or doesn't do as desired. Either way someone has to manually resolve it.
Take that and put it on steroids for securities transactions.
It seems silly that bank transactions, stock trades, purchases of insurance or anything like that requires human intervention. It's like an HTTP request requiring a human to put it through. Bonkers.