A transaction account, also called a checking account, chequing account, current account, demand deposit account, or share account at credit unions, is a deposit account or bank account held at a bank or other financial institution. It is available to the account owner "on demand" and is available for frequent and immediate access by the account owner or to others as the account owner may direct. Access may be in a variety of ways, such as cash withdrawals, use of debit cards, cheques and electronic transfer. In economic terms, the funds held in a transaction account are regarded as liquid funds. In accounting terms, they are considered as cash.
Cheque clearing or bank clearance is the process of moving cash from the bank on which a cheque is drawn to the bank in which it was deposited, usually accompanied by the movement of the cheque to the paying bank, either in the traditional physical paper form or digitally under a cheque truncation system. This process is called the clearing cycle and normally results in a credit to the account at the bank of deposit, and an equivalent debit to the account at the bank on which it was drawn, with a corresponding adjustment of accounts of the banks themselves. If there are not enough funds in the account when the cheque arrived at the issuing bank, the cheque would be returned as a dishonoured cheque marked as non-sufficient funds.
A giro transfer, often shortened to giro, is a payment transfer between current bank accounts and initiated by the payer, not the payee. The debit card has a similar model. Giros are primarily used in Europe; although electronic payment systems exist in the United States, it is not possible to perform third-party transfers with them. In the European Union, the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) allows electronic giro or debit card payments in euros to be executed to any euro bank account in the area.
The Australian financial system consists of the arrangements covering the borrowing and lending of funds and the transfer of ownership of financial claims in Australia, comprising:
A cheque is a document that orders a bank, building society to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, known as the drawer, has a transaction banking account where the money is held. The drawer writes various details including the monetary amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, known as the drawee, to pay the amount of money stated to the payee.
In banking and finance, clearing refers to all activities from the time a commitment is made for a transaction until it is settled. This process turns the promise of payment into the actual movement of money from one account to another. Clearing houses were formed to facilitate such transactions among banks.
Bacs Payment Schemes Limited (Bacs), previously known as Bankers' Automated Clearing System, is responsible for the clearing and settlement of UK automated direct debit and Bacs Direct Credit and the provision of third-party services. Bacs became a subsidiary of Pay.UK on 1 May 2018, and responsibility for direct debit, Bacs Direct Credit, the Current Account Switch Service, Cash ISA Transfer Service and the Industry Sort Code Directory was given to Pay.UK.
The Pay.UK is a United Kingdom service company that provides people, facilities and expertise to the UK payments industry.
The Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) is a real-time gross settlement payment system used for sterling transactions in the United Kingdom.
A direct debit or direct withdrawal is a financial transaction in which one organisation withdraws funds from a payer's bank account. Formally, the organisation that calls for the funds instructs their bank to collect an amount directly from another's bank account designated by the payer and pay those funds into a bank account designated by the payee. Before the payer's banker will allow the transaction to take place, the payer must have advised the bank that they have authorized the payee to directly draw the funds. It is also called pre-authorized debit (PAD) or pre-authorized payment (PAP). After the authorities are set up, the direct debit transactions are usually processed electronically.
Sort codes are the domestic bank codes used to route money transfers between financial institutions in the United Kingdom, and formerly in the Republic of Ireland. They are six-digit hierarchical numerical addresses that specify clearing banks, clearing systems, regions, large financial institutions, groups of financial institutions and ultimately resolve to individual branches. In the UK they continue to be used to route transactions domestically within clearance organizations and to identify accounts, while in the Republic of Ireland they have been deprecated and replaced by the Single European Payment Area (SEPA) systems and infrastructure.
A standing order is an instruction a bank account holder gives to their bank to pay a set amount at regular intervals to another's account. The instruction is sometimes known as a banker's order.
Remote deposit or mobile deposit is the ability of a bank customer to deposit a cheque into a bank account from a remote location, without having to physically deliver the cheque to the bank. This was originally accomplished by scanning a digital image of a cheque into a computer then transmitting that image to the bank, but is now accomplished with a smartphone. The practice became legal in the United States in 2004 when the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act took effect, though banks are not required to implement the system.
The Faster Payments Service (FPS) is a United Kingdom banking initiative to reduce payment times between different banks' customer accounts to typically a few seconds, from the three working days that transfers usually take using the long-established BACS system. CHAPS, which was introduced in 1984, provides a limited faster-than-BACS service for "high value" transactions, while FPS is focused on the much larger number of smaller payments, subject to limits set by the individual banks, with some allowing Faster Payments of up to £1million. Transfer time, while expected to be short, is not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that the receiving institution will immediately credit the payee's account.
The Payments Council was an organisation of financial institutions in the United Kingdom, which set strategy for UK payment mechanisms from 2007 until 2015.
A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans, mobilising saver surplus to deficit spenders. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is an Indian public sector company that operates retail payments and settlement systems in India. The organization is an initiative of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Indian Banks' Association (IBA) under the provisions of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, for creating a robust payment and settlement infrastructure in India.
Cheque truncation is a cheque clearance system that involves the digitization of a physical paper cheque into a substitute electronic form for transmission to the paying bank. The process of cheque clearance, involving data matching and verification, is done using digital images instead of paper copies.
The Irish Payment Services Organisation Limited (IPSO) was established in June 1997. IPSO was a company limited by guarantee owned by its member banks.
Vocalink is a payment systems company headquartered in the United Kingdom, created in 2007 from the merger between Voca and LINK. It designs, builds and operates the UK payments infrastructure, which underpins the provision of the Bacs payment system and the UK ATM LINK switching platform covering 65,000 ATMs and the UK Faster Payments systems.
