If I take a check to Sam’s to pay my monthly bill, they use Electronic Transfer, scan the check, then hand it back to me and the money immediately goes from my account to Sam’s.
Looks like banks could do that. But I guess they are too cheap to buy the equipment necessary........................
It is dependent on the bank that issued the check
Two reasons why they don’t
1. Most banks are still running off of 1960s mainframes with code written in COBOL. I am not joking. They are using modern x86 servers but they are running an emulated mainframe. See Fiserv and Unisys. And why not? The code has been stable for decades.
2. The banks don’t want to immediately clear the. Heck because then they wouldn’t get overdrawn fees. Banks make a lot of money off of those fees.