Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharemywin | Hacker News Reader

I would like to see account numbers be portable like phone numbers are now.

I would like to see us abstract another layer between an arbitrary number and a person. We do have another system by which you enter a seemingly-random number to connect to the person, and we abstracted it with DNS. If you're a Facebook user, privacy concerns aside, you can change your number there and it gets updated on your friends' phones, I think. Is there any sort of OSS tool to do the same - automate updates to your contact info, so you don't have to tell your friends when you change the phone number which ingresses to your voice chat/SMS systems?

I don't see the benefit of this and it would introduce needless technical complexity; the UK's "faster switching" process is probably what you actually want for changing bank account.

Unless it has dramatically improved in the recent past, the UK's "faster switching" process isn't what any sane person would want for changing bank account. Last time I made the mistake of using it, it was a great way to swap spending a couple of hours notifying regular creditors and debtors of new account details with spending a couple of weeks cleaning up the mess the two banks involved made of the "automatic" transfer, and then spending the same time contacting all the same regular creditors and debtors to make sure they had the same new account details anyway. Has it got better lately?

How would that work? Your money doesn't just sit in your account. The banks use it to fund loans. Loans that they make money on. That's the premise of the whole finance system...

You are already allowed to leave your bank, and go to a different bank. The 'only' thing this would change is you would be able to take your account number with you. BTW, european banks have explicitly not enabled this with IBAN, as the bank's name is now part of the account number.

I don't think account numbers will get portable due to the issue you raised. However UK has kept pushing bank portability with "current account switch guarantee" which seamlessly transfers all your incoming/outgoing direct debits and the balance then closes your old account.

In The Netherlands almost all banks support a "forwarding service" when switching banks: direct debits to the old account will be forwarded for at least a year to the new bank (account).

You can bet the banks didn't think of this themselves, but it was probably forced on them by a consumer protection law. It is, coincidentally, something most Dutch people don't know exists.

What does that have to do with your personal bank account number?

I don't understand why.

Can you explain your reasoning?

For people like me in the US, it's a gigantic pain to switch every direct-debit payment setting from the old routing/account number to the new.

Often with things like auto-bill-pay, you have to wait a billing cycle for the new changes to take effect. And you generally have to keep the two accounts open until everything is switched over, or face the wrath of failed direct debits.

Routing numbers aren't really something you can transfer, though. It defeats the whole point of a routing number if they get spread all over the system because clients move.

That's what I was thinking. If you can't take both, why bother at all?

I think that in europe this is less of a problem because european banking does not depend so much on direct-debits. But, on the other hand in Czech republic almost everybody uses service called SIPO (acronym translates to something like "Centralized direct-debit for citizen's payments") which works as additional virtual account for direct-debits which you can associate with whatever account you currently use (or even not associate to anything and get invoices in mail) without notifying anybody else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com