Thank you.
I had a half-hour conversation with a client about a month ago on clearance rules. I'm going to use an example in order to clarify the issue. A credit card is due tomorrow, say, June 8. The balance is $1,000. It's with credit card X. You go into bank Y and pay your bill on the machine, on June 8. The money is taken out of your account as of when you do that transaction on that machine. However, that money is not credited to the account that you've just paid until a few days later because of “clearance rules”.
So the consumer has the worst of all possible worlds. He or she, being a good consumer, has paid their balance on the due date, which is what they're encouraged to do to avoid interest, when in fact they're going to get whacked for interest on their statement the following month. They get killed on the interest out of their bank account and they get killed on their credit card at a fairly high rate, and then they get compounded on the month following the month following.
It was a big shock when the constituent described it to me. I didn't quite realize that, with electronic banking, this was not an instantaneous transaction.
I wonder whether you've had any conversations with the financial institutions about this kind of issue, and also what it is they're prepared to do to stop gouging consumers on both ends of the transaction.