It is so simple to do a financial transaction such as making a payment by cheque or credit card that little thought is given to how the money physically gets from one bank to another.
Every day in South Africa hundreds of transactions involving millions of rands are processed and physically transferred between financial institutions.
Behind the scenes, South Africa's national payment system is undergoing an enormous change.
March saw the introduction of a new system, the South African Multiple Option Settlement System (SAMOS) in which banks are able to make payments between themselves and the Reserve Bank electronically, bringing South Africa in line with international standards.
When you, for example, make a payment by cheque, it is forwarded by the bank where the cheque was deposited to a clearing house called the Automated Clearing Bureau (ACB), says Johann Bence, payment system adviser at the South African Reserve Bank.
Here the payment instructions from the banks are sorted and payment records are exchanged between banks to enable them to complete their accounting processes.
Close to a million cheques are processed by the ACB every day.
What banks owe each other is determined by the ACB and the settlement figures are forwarded to the Reserve Bank's SAMOS system.
Most of the clearing process takes place overnight and the settlement figures are forwarded to the Reserve Bank early the next morning.
The Reserve Bank, acting as the settlement provider, generates interbank settlement instructions on behalf of the banks, and depending on the previous day's transactions, some banks receive funds, while others pay funds.
Since the introduction of the new settlement system, banks can do high value transfers electronically and in real time.
The old system also meant that if your bank wanted to give you an assurance that it had received money on your behalf from another bank, your bank exposed itself to the other bank until the settlement was actually received.
This problem has been addressed by the new system through prefunding. In other words, a request to transfer funds will only be carried out by the Reserve Bank's settlement system, if the bank issuing the instruction has sufficient funds in its settlement account to meet payments issued by clients.
Should a bank not have enough funds in its settlement account to carry out a fund transfer request, the system will automatically determine whether the bank has any financial instruments to be pledged as collateral for a Reserve Bank loan.
Banks will be able to receive funds, obtained in the interbank market (where banks borrow money from each other if they experience a shortage), directly in their settlement accounts in the Reserve Bank's books.
They can also use the system to make high value payments to each other in real time during the day although final settlement of accumulated payments will still take place the next day at 9am.
Banks will be able to monitor their financial positions in real time and use this facility to assess their liquidity.
The new SAMOS system is being implemented in phases.
In October this year, intra-day settlements will be introduced. This will allow banks to do interbank fund transfers throughout the day to other banks and to the Reserve Bank and will achieve finality of payment. In other words, payments will be irrevocable, says Bence.
The final phase involves moving the end-of-day settlement process from 9am on the day following the payments, to the same day.
The SAMOS system addresses the lack of a swift, real time transfer system that offers finality of payment, he says.