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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

If you're asking about making transfers electronically inside the US, that already exists -- the system is called ACH. You use your bank's routing number and your account number. It's not as widely adopted for things like bill payments, since the US banking system is quite antiquated (they still use checks for many payments).

If you're asking about international payments between US and EU banks, currently you do that using the SWIFT network (i.e. wires). It's $25-30 a pop. And there are significant regulatory and technical barriers to getting this cost down (see the EU's SEPA program for a regional version, and that's with a bunch of countries that have already normalized their financial regulations).

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> 25-30$ a pop

As a sidenote, some financial companies named "forex" are specialized in international payments. I use currenciesdirect.com, they don't take a commission and their exchange rate is within 2% of the Google rate. Most other banks apply a 5-10% spread as a hidden fee.

The secret is, they have a bank account in every country, so it's a local payment in US with no fee, and no fee for their bank transfer between their French bank account and yours.

Unfortunately many banks seem to put up arbitrary hurdles to performing ACH transfers, or obscure the fact that they are available. Certainly I've had this issue with Wells Fargo, US Bank, and BoA.

I assume this is because a number of them use "free, easy transfers between our customers" as a selling point, which would vanish quickly if it were easy to do between anybody. Sometimes it seems like we're even sliding backwards -- for example Chase used to have a fairly nice person-to-person payment system, but they recently locked it down to people with their own Chase account.

One problem is that ACH transfers are inherently quite insecure and the banks don't want to be held liable for fraud. It's in the bank's best interest to make transfers difficult and to check the source and destination identities pretty thoroughly.

Sarah Jeong wrote about her experience with ACH fraud here, where her bank account was emptied when someone found her account and routing numbers: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-i-hate-securi...

This is why I use separate accounts for different things. Bill pay is a separate account. Direct deposit is a separate account. I have an account I _only_ use for writing paper checks (rare these days).

It's a pain in the ass, but a long time ago an employer errantly clawed back a full month of payroll direct deposits from me instead of another employee. The bank couldn't/wouldn't help, and the company's payroll was handled by a third party who was not helpful at all.

How do you move money among the accounts? I like the idea of using multiple bank accounts as financial firewalls for my money, but it seems difficult or expensive to move the funds, especially if the accounts are not all at the same institution.

ACH transfers (aka bill pay in some banks), most regular payments out of account X also have a corresponding transfer ~5 days prior from a main cash account to account X.

It's not flawless, but it is insulation against ACH fraud, both electronic and forged checks/e-checks (I've been hit by both before).

It also makes it nearly impossible to use most budgeting softwares out there, aside from battle-tested Excel.

I wonder whether the issue is that consumer protection laws are not strong enough in the US banking system. In the UK, the Direct Debit regulations make it very easy to dispute/reverse charges, so there is little risk to giving your details to companies.

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