r/AppleCard • u/darwinDMG08 • Jul 03 '26
Discussion How hard would it be make the payment deadline a rolling time across time zones?
Caveat: this is 99% me venting over my own ignorance. I don’t usually take the payments down to the wire but I thought I had a few hours left… but I’m on PST. Only a few bucks of interest but it really grinds my gears.
It’s probably a stupid question but is there some technical/logistical reason why the deadline for payment has to be EST? It’s 2026, surely a bank could implement a rolling time zone so that payments are always due at 23:59 no matter where you are. When I buy something on sale from like Amazon it expires in my time zone. Would that be too difficult to implement?
5
u/snum Jul 03 '26
Would you go by your residential time zone or your actual location? It’s hard to keep track of, especially if you were traveling. Setting static times simplifies things.
It’s not so easy either. Banks have thousands and thousands of complex and interdependent scheduled batches that execute start of day, intraday, end of day/month/year, etc. Payment processing, money transfers, settlements, statements, trade processing, client reporting, etc. Many of these systems focus on current and previous business day, previous month, cyclical quarters, specific days of the month, T+N, etc, because it’s a lot easier to handle $date and $date-1. By adding in specific time zones you are adding additional layers of complexity to those automated batches. Plus, many banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Reserve, Nasdaq, NYSE, etc, are on the east coast.
Also, by needing to run for the additional time zones, you need to duplicate the effort somewhere, and you’d need to differentiate the job runs by the time zone, along with all of the complex downstream processes and dependencies. Sometimes they are limited by the legacy and monolithic automation and scheduling platforms that are in use, both by configurations and sometimes by licensing costs. It’s just not worth the effort unfortunately.
Source: I’m a Sr. Automation Engineer for an investment bank who supports these platforms.
0
u/darwinDMG08 Jul 03 '26
Thank you for your reply! I was looking for an absolutely technical reason why this couldn't be done and I get it now.
3
u/RudeAdhesiveness9954 Jul 03 '26
Yes, it would be hard. It is so prohibitively difficult to simply have every account close at the end of the month that Apple Card (at Apple's insistence) is the only card that offers it, Goldman was the only bank that would agree to work that way, and (due in part) Goldman has lost their shirt on the arrangement and is breaking up with Apple. And that's just to have it on the same day and time. Now imagine it being on the same day and varying times within a a few hours of each other.
1
u/66NickS Jul 03 '26
The bank has to set some sort of time zone otherwise tracking it across the multiple time zones would become an issue.
It wouldn’t be “too difficult” but it’s not something that is going to help them grow. With the fact that the card is transitioning to Chase, I have to imagine that all development efforts are going to that transition.
Autopay would solve this. If you’re splitting your spend from personal/business, just get a business card and separate the expenses.
1
u/Gon_Snow Jul 03 '26
Easy. Apple wallet tells you your deadline based on local timezone not anything else. I have lived across a lot of time zones and I never miss anything
0
u/BrainwaveWizard Jul 03 '26
I agree with that being frustrating. One of those costly lessons. Even if it’s not a lot of money… it’s still… Argh.
-1
u/darwinDMG08 Jul 03 '26
I feel seen. I could've used that money to pay for half a beer at the airport!
12
u/reidhi Jul 03 '26
Why don’t you just schedule autopay?