Came into a bit of a problem with paypal and for my own interest I was wondering if anyone understood why and could explain it to me? I'll state for the record i'm from the UK and maybe it's something to do with how the UK banks work but not sure. Anyway, over the last few days I've been doing all my Christmas shopping and alongside that I paid for a few paypal transactions. I've never been one to make a note of everything I buy and carefully manage my money this way but I've never had this problem before. Well basically what happened is after the day of Christmas shopping (including paypal) I checked my bank balance and was quite happy with how it looked and ended up buying a few other things.. at this time as I used "INSTANT bank transfer" with my paypal payment method I assumed it taken out of my bank there and then. Turns out it isn't instant and my bank didn't even show it as being taken out until two working days later on my available balance. How does the instant bank transfer work then if it isn't instant? I've checked it now with two different banks here in the UK (Santander and Halifax) and after making the transactions neither of the banks changed my available balance or had any reference to the money until two days after my transaction. Not a big deal like but caused a few small problems for me.
This is batch process, the banks will process transactions in batch at end of some period (4 hours, end of day, or end of week)