The Three-Day Lie

How European banks earn billions by slowing down your money — and why your €3 takes three days to travel three kilometres.

By Sören Van Krunckelsven · Biniru Projects

On Friday afternoon I sent three euros from my BNP Paribas Fortis account to my own Revolut account. The IBANs sit on servers about three kilometres apart — both inside the same EU jurisdiction, both denominated in euro, both governed by the same SEPA scheme that the European Payments Council says guarantees a "single European payments area."

The money arrived three days later.

Not because the network was down. Not because of fraud screening. Not because of any technical limitation that exists in the year 2026. The money sat for three days because that is exactly how the system is designed to behave when you do not specifically opt out of it.

The thing nobody calls by its name

The term banks prefer is "settlement cycle." The honest term is payment float — money in transit that legally belongs to neither the sender nor the recipient, parked on the balance sheet of one bank or another, earning overnight interest on interbank lending markets while the underlying euro is, for all practical purposes, frozen.

SEPA processes roughly 50 billion transactions per year across the European Union. Average ticket sizes vary from a few euros to corporate flows in the millions. Aggregate volume across the system runs into the trillions annually. Every euro that takes one to three business days to settle is a euro that earns somebody else interest while you wait.

The math is uncomfortable. If even a tiny fraction of daily SEPA volume is in transit on any given night — a low estimate would be tens of billions of euro at all times — then at modern overnight rates, the European banking sector earns several hundred million euro per year on float alone. That number is not a conspiracy. It is a mechanical consequence of batch settlement at scale.

The instant rail already exists

This is the part that should anger every regulator, every consumer organisation, every economist who has ever published a chart of declining money velocity.

SCT Inst — SEPA Instant Credit Transfer — has existed since November 2017. It settles in under ten seconds, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. It is built on the same SEPA scheme. It works across the same banks. The European Union, recognising that the standard rail had become an indefensible drag on the single market, made SCT Inst mandatory for incoming transfers across all EU banks as of January 2025, and for outgoing transfers later that year.

And yet, on a personal current account at almost any major European retail bank, instant transfer is not the default. It is a checkbox you must find and tick before pressing "send." It is sometimes hidden behind an extra fee. It is rarely promoted in the bank's app onboarding. The customer-facing default remains the slow rail — the one that earns the bank money while the customer waits.

The letter of the regulation is met. The spirit is sabotaged.

The macroeconomic price

Here is where my €3 anecdote stops being a personal grievance and becomes a policy question worth shouting about.

The European Central Bank has been publishing increasingly worried papers about declining money velocity — the rate at which a single euro changes hands across the real economy in a given period. Lower velocity means each euro is supporting fewer transactions, which translates directly into less GDP per unit of money supply. ECB economists wring their hands. Politicians blame consumer caution, demographic shifts, post-pandemic uncertainty.

And meanwhile, every standard SEPA transfer is, by design, freezing money for one to three days at a stretch.

This is not a side-effect. It is not a bug. It is not an unfortunate legacy of older systems we are slowly migrating away from. It is the operating model of a sector whose primary product, when you strip away the marketing, is controlled latency on other people's money.

What the regulation should actually look like

Three things, none of them radical:

One. SCT Inst should be the default rail for every personal account in the EU, with no checkbox, no extra fee, and no UI friction. The customer should have to actively opt out, not opt in.

Two. Banks that continue to charge a premium for instant transfers on personal accounts should be required to publish quarterly disclosures of the float-revenue they earn from holding standard transfers. Sunshine is the cheapest regulator.

Three. The European Central Bank should commission and publish a serious independent estimate of the velocity drag imposed by current settlement practices. Banks have been quoting their own studies for decades. It is past time for someone with no skin in that particular game to do the math.

The €3 lesson

I run a small project from a flat in Borgerhout. I sell software tools at micro-prices — three euros, twelve euros, the kind of thing you might pay for a sandwich. When a customer pays me on the standard SEPA rail, the system tells them: "please wait one to three business days." They wait. They sometimes give up. And while they wait, my three euros, and theirs, are sitting on someone else's balance sheet, earning someone else's interest.

Multiply that small frustration by every micro-business, every freelancer, every cross-border invoice in the European Union. What you get is a continent-wide brake on small-scale economic activity, levied as a private tax by the very institutions whose infrastructure subsidies are paid for, ultimately, with public money.

The three-day wait is not a feature of the technology. The technology to move money in ten seconds exists, is mandated by law, and is sitting unused on the same servers that handle the slow transfers. The wait is a policy choice, made by individual banks, that the regulators have so far permitted.

It does not need to stay that way.

— end —

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