Bloomfield State Bank Real-Time FAQs

What is Real-Time?

Bloomfield State Bank recently enhanced our systems to better serve your banking needs.  One of the new features is the ability to post transactions to your account’s available balance immediately. This is what we call real-time.

Real-Time can be defined as any transaction the bank receives taking effect on your accounts available balance within seconds.  Your available balance equals the current balance from previous business day processing plus all your upcoming transactions.  Upcoming transactions are considered to be any transaction that will post to your account within the next two business processing days (available balance = current balance + upcoming transactions).   This includes transactions that are debit/point of sale (POS), ATM, e-banking, telephone banking (EVE), automated clearing house (ACH), and checks or deposits that are posted to your account.

Limitations that may cause Real-Time to be slow or delayed:

Debit Card Transactions:

·         Merchant/Business Processing: 
If a merchant does not settle your debit transaction, meaning the merchant or the business, telephone or website you made your transaction at processes your transaction offline or does not send their deposit to their bank immediately it will delay the real-time until they do so.  These transactions will show as a Pre-Authorization and will be replaced by a posting transaction once settled.

·         Debit Pre-Authorizations:
If a merchant does not settle their account promptly, the pre-authorization will hold on your account until they do so. An example of a pre-authorization is paying for gas at the pump with your debit card. Before you pump the gas the machine on the pump is programmed to pre-authorize a certain amount of money to ensure the merchant will receive their money. Once you finish pumping gas, the gas pump will reverse the pre-authorization and charge your debit card for the actual amount. Occasionally the gas pumps are offline or only settle their merchant account once a day or every few days. This delays the real-time transaction to your accounts available balance until they do so.

Instances where merchants do not settle the transaction with the same Batch or Sequence number used to create the pre-authorization will end up causing the pre-authorizations to remain on your account.  In cases such as this, the pre-authorization will be purged from your account by us immediately upon processing the actual transaction.  However this is done at the end of business day processing and on occasions you will have both the pre-authorization and the actual transaction reflecting your available balance.  If you see this happen and would like it removed earlier than processing deadlines, please contact us.

·         ATM Withdrawals:
If you use an ATM, your transaction should reflect your available balance within seconds and will then process and post to your account in during the business day in which it was received. 

·         ATM Deposits:  
If you deposit funds to your account via ATM, these funds will not reflect your accounts Available Balance until processed on the business day processing in which it was deposited.  This occurs in the evenings of business days.

ACH (Automated Clearing House):

·         No Delayed Effective Date Specified:
ACH transactions such as direct deposits, electronic transactions (Debits or Credits), or checks converted to electronic ACH items will reflect your available balance immediately after we receive them.  They will then process and post to your account in during the business day in which it was received.  ACH files are processed Monday thru Friday.  

·         Delayed Effective Date Specified (ACH Warehouse Items):
The exception to this rule would be transactions we receive early on your behalf, called ACH warehouse transactions.  These are transactions where the company sending them to us instructs us not to make the transaction effective until a specified date.  We must honor this request, so we store the transaction until the specified date is reached and post to your account.  We cannot release these funds to your available balance early.  We will release and post them to your current balance during the daily processing in which the effective date is specified.  Most direct deposits (such as payroll) are done this way.

Checks & Deposits:

·         Checks deposited/cashed at our branches:
Any check you cash or deposit at a Bloomfield State Bank branch will reflect your available within seconds. These items will then process and post to your account during the business day in which they were received.

·         Checks deposited/cashed at other banks & merchants: 
If you cash a check or make a deposit at another bank or write a check to a merchant, we will process the item and post it to your account’s available balance on the business day in which we receive it. This is limited by the person/business cashing the check/deposit, the Federal Reserve delivering the check to us, and the amount of time we need to process the checks to our system.  Checks we receive from another financial institution are processed in the evening, so these will not affect your available balance until later in the evening.

E-Services (E-banking and Telephone Banking):

These transactions will affect your available balance immediately. These items will then process and post to your account in during the business day in which it was received.

CheckFree (Bill-Pay):
These transactions will process as an ACH or a check depending upon the payee and apply to the rules above.

Technical Delays:

·         Telecommunications:
Delays from Telecommunications channels can delay the posting of real-time transactions.  We have several alternate methods of communications setup, however they are designed to work as a fail over and in certain cases do not provide real-time.  An example of this would be fiber optic line outage.  Our communications systems ride several fiber optic lines throughout the United States.  Our network is redundant; however in some cases specific areas cannot be setup to have real-time redundancy.  So we store these types of transactions in an offline environment and post to your account real-time balance as soon as we can.

·         Software & Hardware Maintenance:
Again, we have several redundant systems setup to keep our software working 100% of the time.  However, there are cases in which we cannot deliver the data to you that are beyond our control.  We rely on several third party companies to provide channels of communication, software maintenance and hardware monitoring.  There will however be time were we need dedicated systems for processing, updates, and maintenance.  These types of scenarios will be brief and few in between, however will cause brief periods of delay in processing real-time information.

For lost or stolen ATM/Debit cards 1-800-500-1044

For Lost or Stolen Élan (credit) cards 1-800-558-3424