GLOBAL PAYMENTS KNOWLEDGEISO 20022 / SWIFT / SEPA / MT / MX
PAYMENTSSIGNAL

The interactive academy for the standards, messages, and rails that move money.

PROGRESS
DRILL · WHAT A PAYMENT ACTUALLY IS

Put A simple domestic transfer back in order

These steps are shuffled. Put them back into the order the payment actually takes.

In A simple domestic transfer, what happens first, and what follows?

Step 1 of 1

THE DRILL AS TEXT

  1. In A simple domestic transfer, what happens first, and what follows?
    • The payer asks their bank to pay — Using an app or a branch, the payer gives their bank an instruction: pay this person, at that bank, this amount. Nothing has moved yet — it is only a request.
    • Bank Alfa checks the instruction — Is the account number valid? Is there enough money? Is anything suspicious? Banks check before they promise.
    • The payer's balance goes down — Bank Alfa reduces the payer's balance. Important: the payee does not have the money yet — it has only left the payer.
    • The instruction travels to the clearing system — Banks do not call each other one by one. They send payment messages to a shared clearing system that connects them all.
    • The clearing system adds everything up — Thousands of payments flow both ways between the banks. The clearing system works out who owes whom overall — a tally, not yet a movement of money.
    • The banks settle up — Bank Alfa's account at the central bank goes down; Nordbank's goes up. Now — and only now — has money truly moved between the banks.

This drill is built from What a payment actually is — it rearranges material written and sourced on that page rather than asserting anything new, so every claim in it is checkable there.