Originally Posted by Yookaroo

Hey folks, been reading along for a while and I thought I could shed some light on what I am sure is helping hold up this issue and that Michael mentions in his statement, but not too clearly.

when you make a purchase visa checks your balance and then approves the purchase or denies it, but even in this digital world, people can still do things manually and submit through mail. Visa has to wait a given amount of time for all those potential transactions to come in before they will release the funds back to your wallets.

Also people make reservations on hotels/trips that are often preapproved on your visa card, I think it can take up to 30 days for those to clear. you may have noticed on your statement that purchases are pending in the past, thats because they are waiting to get the proof from the retailer that the purchase was actually made before actually removing the funds.

Ive worked with Moneris in designing 3rd party billing and I know those are some of the issues we are dealing with now. Visa protects the retailers as well so they dont want to release their end of the funds until they are sure they have all the purchases cleared.