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An investor funds their investment account in real-time. A trade executes in seconds. But transferring funds from that account to a bank account can still take five business days. It is a paradox that Karen Webster, CEO of PYMNTS, put directly to Justin Zhao, head of Visa Direct, North America, in a recent conversation about why investment platforms still struggle with something as fundamental as moving money in and out of their platforms.

The answer is not about demand. Customers clearly want speed. The problem lies elsewhere: in legacy infrastructure, in risk perception, in institutional inertia and in the difficulty of replacing payment plumbing while the house is still occupied.

Zhao spoke about legacy systems with the familiarity of someone who has lived through them.

“I joined at year two of a fixed-income trading platform migration and left at year three, and it was not done,” he told Webster. The project ultimately took five years.

That story is not an outlier. Financial infrastructure was built for a different era, and modernizing it means touching core systems that firms are reluctant to disturb. So, they patch, work around and defer. Checks still get mailed. ACH still takes days. Customers wait.

Webster has experienced this firsthand. She described trying to move money between brokerages, a process that involved a paper check being sent through the mail between two sophisticated financial platforms.

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