Our Ministry of Finance was asked in Parliament whether or not the fact that it had moved its payment contract from Rabo to ING/Postbank had resulted in longer execution times. Not a strange question, because since day and age (about 90 years) the execution time of payments between (former) postgiro to banks looked like 2 days while the reverse route could be done in 1 day. This is due to technical booking conventions (when is the beginning of a new booking day....) applied by the different institutions
Yet, the Ministry of Finance now informs Parliament that as of mid 2005/2006, due to changes in the interbank clearing and settlement cycles, the payment execution time from and to former postgiro (ING) and vice versa is equal. Whilst there have been some complaints of companies with the Tax Authority that execution times differed, those companies were unable to delivery any hard proof or information to the Tax Authority, backing those claims.
