Thank you.
Well, of course in an electronic age we're all used to having instant communication. At the push of a button, we can send an e-mail to one another. But in the payment system, we have a very sophisticated, safe, and secure system, and it requires a number of processes behind it. In terms of paying a bill, there are a number of billers who participate through the Canadian Payments Association and adhere to their rule H6. I'd encourage you to ask them more about that. What it does is say that any biller who adheres to it will agree that the date on which you make your payment is the date on which they will post it to your account, so you won't incur any interest charges or losses there.
In terms of billers who are not part of that system, billers and financial institutions both advise that you should be paying your bill a day or two in advance to make sure it goes through. The reason is that if all billers and financial institutions were completely interconnected, the system would be only as good as its weakest link. Rather, what we do is have batch processing at the end of the day and transfer the funds from the financial institution of the payer to the biller.
As to the technical aspects, I'd certainly encourage you to ask the CPA more about them. It's a system that's very secure and very safe, and this provides a number of benefits to consumers. In Canada, with the payment system we have, if you're depositing a cheque, for example, you are able to get access to those funds immediately in the vast majority of cases. And that's essentially the financial institution giving you credit.