I'm an Australian who lived in Canada for a while. Banking was one of the huge surprises there - I'd get paid with cheques, and to move large sums of money bet

I'm an Australian who lived in Canada for a while. Banking was one of the huge surprises there - I'd get paid with cheques, and to move large sums of money between accounts with different institutions quickly needed to go to a branch, get a cashier's cheque and physically walk it down to the other bank. They'd call the first bank and confirm that it was actually issued in order to speed up processing (even then it wasn't instant). It was all a bit bizarre, considering how much time both banks needed to spend on a routine transaction...