Similar to what the author describes, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this information is generally not public.
But yes, most clearing is done daily. Each bank basically submits their daily flow of money to each other participating bank, and the central ACH (Automated Clearing House) keeps track of the balances. There's some processes in there by which banks can dispute charges, which is super interesting, but also way to complicated for me to detail here.
[1]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/epc-paymen...
I'm saying that this can't be done - at least, not without leaving such a large trail behind that it would be easily reverted, and relevant people prosecuted.
Not really. That's how the accounting works. It's the gold standard, and what we guarantee our customers, it's not universally how we store it though. Plenty of bank systems store just singular balances and infer that back into "transactions" in other systems to make the balance even out. Then the errors in those balances are manually corrected by looking at the sums.
IT systems only rarely match the legal frameworks they operate within.