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.
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.
Said bank employees would rather have the same number of days off we the rest do.
Then these transactions will be delayed anyway. You could still process 99.99% of the transactions on Sunday.
Visa, Mastercard, Paypal as operate 24/7. ATMs operate 24/7. Neo banks allow intra-bank transfers 24/7. And they deal with the fraud and AML stuff.
I knew someone who worked in KYC/AML at a well known 24/7 US crypto exchange.
Their whole team would regularly have to work weekends to keep up with the transaction requirements.
Never worked with financial transactions but I have a feeling what you said qualifies as 'famous last words'.
Surely you must appreciate how obnoxious it is when people assume that software development is just “translating the requirements into code”, right?
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.
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.