How Long Each Payment Method Actually Took

We timed four payment methods from pressing confirm to the crypto arriving at an external address we controlled.

The results

For the tests below we used a fiat to crypto exchange as the reference, because it publishes the figures we were measuring against.

Card: two to four minutes, consistently. Fastest and most expensive.

Instant bank payment through open banking: three to seven minutes. Nearly as fast as card at a fraction of the cost, where the bank was supported.

Standard bank transfer: four hours to next business day, depending entirely on whether it was submitted before the receiving institution’s cut-off.

Corporate transfer: same as standard once the account existed. The variable was onboarding, not settlement.

The part that surprised us

The withdrawal to an external address took longer than the purchase on three of four providers.

One held all first withdrawals for manual review: eleven hours. Another applied a twenty-four hour delay to newly added addresses, which is a good control and worth knowing about in advance. Payment companies face this at a different scale, which is what a corporate crypto wallet addresses.

If you are timing a purchase to a deadline, the deadline is the withdrawal, not the purchase.

Cut-off times matter more than the rail

A standard transfer submitted at 15:40 on a Thursday arrived Friday morning. The same transfer submitted at 16:20 arrived Monday.

Forty minutes changed it by three days. Nobody publishes this prominently and every provider has one.

Open banking coverage

Worked on three of five banks we tried. Where it worked it was the best option by a clear margin: card speed at transfer cost.

Where it did not, the fallback was a standard transfer and the experience was noticeably worse, because the flow assumed it would work.

What we would tell a business

Do the first withdrawal early, small, when nothing depends on it. It is the step with the most variance and the one people discover last.

Register destination addresses in advance so the delay on new addresses has already elapsed when you need to move.

And submit transfers before noon. It costs nothing and removes the cut-off problem entirely.

For anything on a schedule, a provider that publishes its cut-off times and its first-withdrawal process, like a crypto on-ramp with published limits, removes the guesswork that produced most of the variance we measured.