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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

"You still can't transfer money between bank accounts" ???

It's a weird thing in the US where you still can't just go online and send money to any recipient. When I rented a flat, I thought I'd just directly send money to my landlord. Nope, not possible. Not at all. Had to fill out checks. The only other option was to set up an automatic payment at my bank that would automatically send the landlord checks.

Another thing is that in order to get paid, I actually had to sign a permission to allow my employer to transfer money to my account with direct deposit. This means that there are means to transfer money without checks, but this option is somehow not readily available to anyone and the recipient has to sign a permission to allow it. Seriously, why do I have to sign a permission for someone to send me money?

I was absolutely baffled. In some ways, visiting the US felt like traveling back in time to 1980.

That seems utterly insane.

I don't think I've had a rental where automatic debiting of my bank account didn't occur.

I've also only ever used checks for bond, sent to the Bond Board. Never for a damn thing else. They aren't even accepted in most places. My employer pays directly into my bank account, no permission required.

It highly depends on your choice of a bank I have regular citibank account and can send wire transfers online I also have a small credit union account and again can send wire transfers online. So you are trying to generalize personal experience to imply some universal limitations.

Had Wells Fargo which seems to be one of the biggest banks. And not just that, I've also got the stuff about online transfers confirmed by locals who also told me that the only exception that you can count on is when sender and recipient are at the same bank.

The US does have wire transfers but they nearly always cost $15-$20 from what I've seen, which is silly.

Aside from that all you have is ACH, which is what's being complained about.

Most of the developed world has essentially free wire transfers.

To be honest doesn't really matter much how banks structure their fees. It's just a way for them to spread the ops costs.

Banks in europa do just fine without charging for wire transfer, within europa at least, and I still don't have to pay anything for my bank account. Except for a small fee for the credit card.

If I transfer from an account with the Commonwealth Bank, to an account with ANZ, it takes around 300 miliseconds for the funds to arrive.

If I transfer from an account with the Commonwealth Bank, to an international account, like the English bank my brother uses, it takes 3-5 days, depending on if it's a weekend.

I haven't used an American bank before, but how does this compare?

I think they have ways but there are fees involved and some mucking around.

> some mucking around

... I can do it from my phone. Looks like America has some ways to go, yet.

I just wish we had their internet infrastructure. It's far from the best in the world, but it's better than what we have by a long shot.

Australian internet is best described by the string of cursewords necessary to make up the time required to load a video fully.

The current NBN is crap, the rollout has been a disaster and the common person just doesn't understand how crap it actually is.

Thankfully a new line to Hawaii should open in January/February, and that might have a more significant impact on our current congestion.

I'm in the process of moving to a FTTN place, and it's really no different to the crappy experience of ADSL. If it's not FTTP, it's still relying on some crappy company's crappy infrastructure.

I actually have nbn fttn, and ymmv but I love it. 59 bucks a month unlimited download and I get about 95mbit down consistently. I feel like it's a really good deal...

NBN covers 48% of my city, and had to be installed 4 times.

It was supposed to cover 99%, but after the main street had to be torn up six times due to installation mistakes, the city said no more. They weren't challenged on the decision.

Because it is fttn, the main bottleneck, the last mile, remains precisely the same.

So I am required to pay 60, where I used to pay 40, for the same speed and data.

Yeah i saw that if you could actually get the 12mbit plan and be worse off that sucks. Also i just realised mine is FTTB not FTTN, which i imagine changes it a lot. Also I live in the Melbourne CBD. Seems like the mileage varies a lot on this one.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13268653

It takes me several days to set up permissions so I can transfer money from my account at Chase to my account at a local credit union. Except that Chase gave me an error saying that my credit union account was already associated with another account at Chase (probably the old bank account I used to have with them, closed years ago) and so it didn't work and I will have to write myself a check instead.

That sounds horrendous. Is it acceptable because it's the only option? Like so much else?

That's why PayPal was invented, and has competition like Venmo.

If you transfer from an account within a standard US bank to another account within the same bank, it can be same day sometimes, next day others.

If you transfer between US banks, it will take between 1 and 5 business days, depending on when you send it (noon EST is a common cutoff time to have it done overnight), whether you've sent to the account before (sending with ACH, the "normal" way, requires you to confirm ownership of both accounts, which takes around 2 days) and whether you pay for it (if you pay $15-$20 for a "wire transfer", it can be done same day).

You can get around some of that (owning both accounts) by using a physical cheque (yes, they actually use those still in the US) but it can still take more than a day for the funds to be available, depending on the size of the transfer.

There are a whole ton of transfer services like Venmo that work around this by not using the banking system but in the end you usually need to get the money into/out of the bank somehow and you're stuck using the old ways.

Sending internationally is SWIFT, so mostly takes the same amount of time regardless of the bank you use or the country you're in (at least in my experience).

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