Item — HN Reader

German banks (and in general businesses) are amazing. They won't do anything until legally required to do so and even then will drag their feet. There has been instant bank transfers (transfers in 10 seconds) available for a while - launched in November 2017. German banks kept charging 1.5€ for this instant transfer or some didn't have them available at all. They didn't build any of these systems and yet this was their stand.

On January 9 2025, EU made it compulsory to have receipt of transfers instant and in October 2025 - sending too should be available at the same cost as the normal transfer. There's nothing stopping from implementing bot send/receive instant transfers in January 2025. Yet, some of these banks only enabled instant receipts in January and will make the sending available exactly on 8th October 2025, 1 day before the deadline. What a business mindset to have!

3 comments

Have used them for a long time, never paid for them. GLS is a great bank, happy customer. The crappy ones like to keep your money in their books as long as possible.

The resistance against instant payments mostly has to do with technicalities around bank balance sheets and inter-bank settlement systems.

It's a bit complex for a comment, but the TLDR is:

* funds in transit (called "positive float") are held in the banks account, and can be used by the bank to earn interest

* liquidity management - there are a bunch of considerations here, but the longer settlement periods enable banks to do "deferred net settlements" (just paying each other the difference between all transactions in a batched way) and also helps balance sheets in other ways, making it easier to meet reserve requirements, smoothing out intra-day liquidity, etc

The delay also means systems have more time to catch fraudulent transactions, and to block them before they happen.

This comment is not towards you but there's always an excuse with the big German banks.

For example, during Covid when interest rates where negative - some major German banks like Commerzbank charged interest from customers when their balance exceeded an amount like 50000€. Now that the interest rates have gone up - they are not even close to passing on those high interest rates. The same Commerzbank now asks for 50000€ in assets otherwise they charge a 4.90€ subscription charge from their customers.

So yeah there might be technicalities but nothing stops those technicalities being addressed until the law does.

As a reluctant Commerzbank customer, there's some inaccuracies. The amount was 100k€ re: negative interest, and the subscription charge only applies if you're not moving a certain amount of money each month (which is very low, even unemployment payments would be enough to clear that hurdle).

So you're only paying for your second or third account.

> the subscription charge only applies if you're not moving a certain amount of money

This has changed since May 2025. Talk about inaccuracies ;)

Btw, as much as I appreciate the “correction” it doesn’t change overall direction of the comment.

> This has changed since May 2025. Talk about inaccuracies ;)

It has? I've never paid a subscription charge, and I've never been above that amount.

To be clear: I didn't mean they have to drag their feet. They just do it because they will lose some income.

> The delay also means systems have more time to catch fraudulent transactions, and to block them before they happen.

Which is complete nonsense as the transaction is actually forward-payed, and guaranteed by the central European bank, exactly for that reason.

So, in fact, the only reason why certain banks delay payments is so that they can keep the funds "in transit" to earn interests.

Plenty of banks don't play that game, so if your bank does, they are taking the piss and it's time to change.

Care to name those banks?

One prominent example is DKB (easily in the top 10 consumer banks by size)

Also a bank that thought it was a great idea to block all rooted Android users with a minor update to their app. Which is required to use their website. Fuck DKB.