Many banking customers will have reason to rejoice starting next week when a new one day payment rule goes into effect in regards to balance transfers between savings accounts.

The personal and business bank account industry has had the means to transfer funds in as little as a few hours from 2008, restrictions have seen a large number of savers waiting for their payments to arrive for as long as three days.  An electronic system providing standard payments at no additional charge varies from bank to bank, with a cap as low as £10,000 for Barclays account holders or as much as £100,000 for Santander customers, but anything over this figure is either subject to a three day delay, unless the customer wishes to pay a premium for same-day service.

However, new rules go into effect on January 1, with industry experts estimating that more than 15 million payments a month will be rerouted through the faster one day transfer option.  The source of the new rule is eurozone regulation instituted in 2009 in order to facilitate payments made across borders, and the banking industry was given until the New Year to institute the new operating procedures.

The payment system in the UK has been under fire for over ten years, when 2000′s Cruickshank Report, commissioned by the Treasury, discovered that payment arrangements controlled by private entities were harmful to competition, expensive, and slow.  In the wake of the report, an industry body known as the Payments Council was set up and given the task of expediting payments, and did so by instituting the one-day payment system currently in place in the UK.