Just to be clear - it’s absolutely not a loan.
After 4pm the sender cannot recall the payment so we know we certainty that the money will get paid into your account.
We just credit it slightly earlier than it otherwise would be. There’s no loan involved - it’s your money that you’re getting.
The main reason, IIRC, was to give people the choice. As this thread illustrates not everybody wants it, or agrees with it.
It’s been around a long time, in fact I’m pretty sure Tom Blom announced it at the first ever All Hands I attended!
Revolut does theirs automatically which is fine for me but I guess if people like the budgeting etc to be spot on it may not work as well.
You’d have to adjust your analytics every month as I don’t think either platform can reset on receipt of salary payment, and even then you’d have to teach it.
Revolut is part there, with paid early alongside auto salary sorter, but no options to reset analytics for that month on receipt (yet).
I don’t think this blog post has been mentioned yet:
When people get paid, they start doing stuff with their money. And when they start doing stuff with their money, it increases sever load. Giving people the choice (and I think also staggering the notifications in the hours after 4pm) means not having to scale up CPU capacity quite so much as they’d have to do otherwise - so I guess means it costs less and increases stability?