why does electronic funds transfer take 3-5 days?

[Temp20200923a]

I know it's the stated policy, I just don't understand why. To me, 'electronic' means fast. In 3-5 days, I could send the funds by 'snail mail', it might even be quicker. Is Paypal just playing with the 'float' ?

Also, I am currently set up where I transfer funds from my savings account to Paypal. When that runs short, they tap my savings account for the balance. I want to make a visa card the back up source when my Paypal account runs short, but it doesn't seem to allow me to do that. Am I missing something here? Does anyone know how to do that? Thanks in advance!

[tacommuter]

"Float" isn't necessarily all that profitable at the moment, but certainly PayPal benefits from it in this case, yes. The main thing I have noticed, though is that PayPal seems to like to have a couple of day's margin when they do not even INITIATE the transfer. That way, if they receive any disputes, claims, etc., they can reverse the withdrawal to cover potential losses.

That policy would make some sense to me when dealing with new, unproven accounts, but with established sellers it seems clearly unnecessary and abusive.

[WoWer59er]

I just recently did this.  It's been 5 days and the money is Still not here.  I'm sure it'll show up, but it should never take this long to transfer from a bank account that has been verified to a pay-pal account.  Shoot, most banks can instant transfer between accounts, and can do huge sums of money with no problem at all.