Where has my money gone - can you help?

In March 2007 my mother sadly passed away and passed on her estate jointly to my brother and myself.

In October last year, my wife and I opened up a new joint savings account (thankfully at a fixed rate) to take advantage of the increase in the FSA protection scheme whereby couples get twice the amount of their savings covered compared to singletons. This was at the time of the banking crisis so you can understand our keenness to ensure our nest egg was safe.

Move on five months and following yet more stories of falling share prices etc, on Monday I moved a not inconsiderable sum from this account to my current account to ensure that all our savings were covered by the scheme.

This was done online and takes 3 working days. Rather worryingly however, when ringing to check if the transaction had gone through, I was told by a member of the call centre team of my bank that the money is not covered whilst it is in transit between the two banks.

I am going to check this but can any bankers reading this tell me if this is correct? What happens if during one of those days a bank goes bust? Where does my money go for that 3 days?

Also why in this day and age does it still take 3 days to transfer money between banks. I understand it will be because of compliance and money laundering issues but I thought I rememberedd reading somewhere that measures were being brought in to speed things up.

Answers on a postcard.