Public Holidays at the Far End
A national holiday you have never heard of stops a payment for as long as it lasts.
Still yours, and statedTaken, never statedUnit changes; scale restarts
Five steps from instruction to arrival. One step carries no figure: the hatching marks where the money leaves and is not drawn to scale, because there is no figure to draw. Nothing here adds them up, since an amount you cannot see is not an amount you can subtract. Bars here are days remaining, not money: the one that took longest has no stated duration at all.
A payment stops for a public holiday in any country whose systems it needs, including countries neither you nor the payer is in. The holiday may be one you have never heard of and it stops the money for as long as it lasts.
The timing problem in “Public Holidays at the Far End” is easier to investigate when approval and payment events have separate timestamps. When teams assess view the service at source for fte meaning, time and project records can identify whether work was approved before the payment cut-off without pretending to explain delays inside the banking route.
Knowing the far end's calendar is an hour's work once a year and removes most of the unexplained delays in this subject.
Additional context relevant to “Public Holidays at the Far End” is available through ISO 20022 payment standard. A useful review distinguishes the sent amount, conversion, fees, settlement date and landed amount.
Whose holidays matter
Three calendars, and the third is invisible:
- The sending country's.
- The receiving country's.
- The home country of any currency being converted, and of any correspondent being used.
The third is the one that catches people, because nothing in the arrangement makes it visible.
You will usually not know which correspondent is involved, which means this particular cause can be suspected and almost never confirmed.
Holidays that last
Several countries have multi-day national holidays, and a few have periods where business effectively stops for a week or more.
A payment instructed just before one of these waits for the whole thing. Where your corridor includes such a period, planning around it once a year is simpler than explaining it afterwards.
The effect is also wider than the holiday itself, because volume builds up before it and clears slowly afterwards.
Regional holidays
In several countries holidays differ by region, and a bank's processing centre may be closed when the rest of the country is working.
This produces delays that look random and are not. It is rarely worth investigating and is worth knowing exists.
Moveable dates
Some holidays follow a lunar calendar and move each year. Others are set by proclamation a few weeks in advance.
A list built last January may be wrong this year. Checking annually is the only reliable approach.
It is a ten-minute job in December and it prevents a specific kind of surprise that is otherwise unavoidable.
The currency's country
A conversion frequently requires the market for that currency to be open. A holiday in the home country of the currency can delay a payment between two countries that are both working normally.
That is the single most confusing version of this problem and the explanation for many otherwise baffling delays.
Building the list
Both ends, for the year, in whatever calendar you already use. Add the currency's country if it differs.
Twenty entries, once a year. It converts a category of mystery into something you can see coming.
Put them in the same calendar you already look at rather than in a separate file. A list nobody opens is a list that does not exist.
Telling the payer in advance
A short note before a known closure: this period is a holiday at my end, so a payment instructed after a given date will not arrive until afterwards.
Most payers appreciate it, and some will bring the payment forward.
Asking them to bring it forward
Entirely reasonable for a known closure and usually agreed, because it costs them nothing to instruct a payment two days early.
Ask once, specifically, with the dates. A standing request to "consider holidays" will not survive a change of staff.
When the holiday is at their end
The payment is not instructed at all until they are back. Your chasing during that period reaches nobody.
Knowing their calendar prevents a week of increasingly worried messages into an empty office.
Year end
The period around the turn of the year is slow almost everywhere: a cluster of holidays at both ends, reduced staffing and heavy volume.
Payments due then deserve a larger buffer than at any other time, and a payment due on the last day of December is best moved.
Asking in November is easy and asking in late December is not, because by then the people who could agree to it are away.
Recording what actually happened
When a payment is late, note whether a holiday explains it. Over a year this builds a picture of which closures affect your corridor.
Several delays that looked like a bank problem turn out to be the same holiday recurring.
What the calendar cannot cover
A closure in a country you did not know was involved. The correspondent chain is invisible, and a holiday in a third country can stop a payment with no indication of why.
Where a delay has no explanation from either calendar, that is usually what happened, and it is unprovable. The useful conclusion is that the route passes through somewhere unexpected — which is an argument for changing the route rather than for extending the calendar.
Which is the recurring shape of this section: the predictable delays can be designed away, and what remains is smaller, rarer and has to be carried rather than solved.