Why Faster Payments aren’t always so fast

Written by Sally

Back in January, the Tally platform underwent a significant upgrade that included issuing customers with individual account numbers and integrating the Faster Payments network, a form of electronic funds transfer for account to account payments in the UK.

With almost immediate transfer of funds between eligible accounts, the Faster Payments network has become an essential feature of any traditional or challenger banking account. However, there are a couple of reasons why a Faster Payment into your Tally account may not always be quite so fast.

Firstly, the Faster Payments network was designed solely with traditional fiat currencies in mind, so in order to use the network, every Tally account must also have a GBP account connected to the traditional banking system. This means that when a deposit is made into a Tally account, it first appears on a customer’s GBP ledger through the Faster Payments network. Once the deposit is showing on a customer’s GBP ledger (circa two hours), it is typically converted to Tally within two minutes. However, because Tally represents the physical gold that a customer owns, a single large deposit or an increased volume of deposits in a short time frame may represent more than the gold we hold in reserve. When this is the case, we must first purchase additional gold via our LBMA-accredited broker before allocating it to the customer’s Tally account, which can take anywhere from a few hours up to one working day. The only way to mitigate this delay would be to issue Tally without holding the corresponding gold in the vault, which goes against everything we stand for as a company.

Secondly, as with all banks and banking account providers, Tally conducts security checks on all transactions, and if a manual review is required, the payment will not be instant. This process not only ensures compliance with the relevant legislation and regulations regarding fraud prevention, anti-money laundering and terrorist financing, it also protects our customers from fraud or suspicious activity – something we absolutely stand for as a company.

While the introduction of Faster Payments to your Tally account has resulted in a great improvement in the customer experience, it’s not perfect and can occasionally result in an error. If you have experienced an issue with a Faster Payment coming in or leaving your Tally account, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected], so we can get this resolved for you as soon as possible.

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