You've made me terribly jealous of the UK. I'm in the US and see our current situation with regard to money transfer as an extremely dangerous one. Aside from the annoyance of money transfers needing to go through a bank, the fact that payment networks charge a PERCENTAGE drives me mad. It does not cost more to move a larger number over the wire. There is no justification whatsoever in charging a fee which gets larger when more money changes hands. And as more and more of our economy moves away from cash and toward payments that flow through these networks that skim percentages, we are quickly getting to a point where banks and credit card companies are getting to skim a percentage off of each and every single transaction that ever takes place in our entire economy. That is madness. We are setting them up as de-facto tax collectors, with the ability to levy and collect taxes with no public involvement. People fought wars over that in the past.

I've had an account with Dwolla for ages, and absolutely love what they provide. Flat fee money transfer. It saddens me that I can't use Dwolla everywhere. Are the advances in the ACH system going to do away with fees that include a percentage component? I would be very surprised if banks simply decided to voluntarily step back from a system that will enable them to have more control over the US economy than the federal government (there are many tax-free transactions in our economy that the banks will still get to 'tax' with their transfer fees, giving them more control).

Most people probably don't realize what a herculean effort you are involved in. During college I worked in a data center for a bank as a mainframe operator (this was 1997-2001), and processing the ACH data was one of my responsibilities. The system the bank used was an NCR mainframe. It was so old that during my time there, the company (it was actually a separate company from the bank for some reason) received a call and was told that the only other organization in the country still running that model of mainframe, a restaurant in North Carolina, was getting rid of it and would give it to us for free if we would haul it away. We setup a Disaster Recovery system with it. I left the data center shortly before graduating college, and the bank was being acquired by a larger bank which was going to bring all of the processing into their own data center. However, about a decade later I ran into my old boss and learned that the transition never happened. Moving away from that ancient mainframe was apparently deemed too problematic/expensive so it persisted. I would not be surprised if that mainframe was still running the show for half a dozen bank branches, with its antiquated tape drives (the kind where the tape is a big reel, 9-track I think, like the things you see in films of mainframes from the 1960s). Banks are, as far as I understand it, the pinnacle of 'if its working, don't upgrade it'. My hats off to you sir for being involved with trying to move us forward!