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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Even before this, Australia still had direct person-to-person transfers. They'd just take a day, and required an account number and name.

I've written about this before, but American is terribly far behind on this:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-i...

The closest thing we have in the US is Zelle, which is not a government mandated standard (like ACH) but a private standard created by banks and which only a fraction of banks in the US currently support.

And of course there are services like Venmo/Paypal, but these are private opt-in services, where as most other countries have this system mandated and fee-free between banks via their government reserve banks.

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The US is in dismal shape compared to the UK and now Australia--And its pretty infuriating.

Although from what I understand on March 16th, 2018 the US will at least get same-day ACH. However, it will still be batch processed only two times each day--During banking hours no less! https://www.nacha.org/rules/same-day-ach-moving-payments-fas...

There is a NPR planet money on why the US has such an archaic system: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/epis...

Their hypothesis? Unsurprisingly, perverse incentives. Wire transfers in the US, which usually carry a high fee ($30) are very lucrative for banks so they don't have much interest in eliminating the need for wire transfers at the moment, but it appeared that there was growing interest in moving to real-time eventually.

India has instantaneous IMPS bank transfers.

> and now Australia

I'd argue the system this sort of replaces, bank numbers + account numbers, was still better than the US. It provided next day transfer between banks and intra day transfers between the same bank. All for free.

Yes. I moved from Australia to the US in 2012 and was amazed to discover paper cheques are still a common transfer instrument, and that bank to bank transfers were not easy, standardised, or free.

> Wire transfers in the US, which usually carry a high fee ($30)

Is this for real ? This sounds incredibly expensive. We have free next-day wire transfers within the entire EU, and real-time transfers for free in The Netherlands. Even my business bank account only charges 2 cents per transfer.

How do Americans wire money to each other when it's so expensive ?

They send each other checks. Actual piece-of-paper checks.

To their credit, they've got it to the point where I can take a picture of the front/back of the check with my smartphone, upload the photos to my bank's website and deposit it that way, but the first time I did this I felt really weird about the whole thing...

On my backlog is to write an app that displays a check on a tablet where you can put in your details. Then have someone take a photo with their bank app of your tablet. I bet it would work .. and show how absolutely assine and archaic we are.

In every other country I lived in, I never ordered checks, or used checks. In the US, even if I bill pay via my bank, it mails out a physical check to company it doesn't have an ACH policy with (like landlords)

I imagine some of the pictures are randomly selected for manual review, and especially any pictures that the bank deems the least bit iffy.

Unless you'd like to hire lawyers to help you with a fraud case, I'd recommend not taking that our of your backlog.

Aussie here. I never knew that the U.S lacked this. We've had this feature for decades. Within the same bank, it's instant. Inter-bank it can happen the same day depending on the banks involved and when they run their batch processing. I always considered this a primitive system for not being instant.

Same here. I am consistently amazed by the amount of things like this that I take for granted.

I'm an Australian who lived in Canada for a while. Banking was one of the huge surprises there - I'd get paid with cheques, and to move large sums of money between accounts with different institutions quickly needed to go to a branch, get a cashier's cheque and physically walk it down to the other bank. They'd call the first bank and confirm that it was actually issued in order to speed up processing (even then it wasn't instant).

It was all a bit bizarre, considering how much time both banks needed to spend on a routine transaction...

Australian who lived in the US here.

It used to make me laugh when Americans would describe Australia as 'like the US 10 years ago'.

Then I would write them a check.

Then I would try and send a text message that wouldn't go across networks as had always worked in Australia for years...

In Australia leaving in the 1990s I had never written a check because even then B-Pay was around and people did direct deposit for rent and things.

But Australia probably has about as many banks as California, so we have a much smaller problem.

This is good to hear. I've been getting increasingly disappointed with a lot of things we do in Australia, so it's good to hear that we're ahead of or on par with other "developed" countries in at least a few things.

Nitpicky correction: before this, they only took a day if interbank. If intra-bank, they were immediate (at least on all the banks I've used).

This sounds similar to the "faster payments" system we have here in the UK, where most transfers should clear within 2 hours (in my experience they actually clear in a matter of minutes, but I guess they say '2 hours' to give a worst case SLA)

I thought this was fairly normal, until I heard about the way US banks do it on an episode of Planet Money.

The interesting thing about the new Australian system is the fact that you can use an email address or phone number instead of annoying bank account numbers, that's a nice feature. I find account numbers give me crippling anxiety when making big payments, ending up having to triple check that I've inputted every digit correctly etc

Zelle doesn't even come close. It looks fine until you use it.

Then you discover that:

1)You need an app to use it (because websites are so passe!) - an app that may or may not work, and will likely crash;

2)You will hit an arbitrary, hidden limit when you try to use it - as insultingly low as $300/week for an out-of-network bank.

These limits are not posted anywhere, and it takes 2 levels of computer service just to find out what they are.

3)The ClearXChange network (aka Chase QuickPay, etc) that didn't have these drawbacks has been shut down and replaced by Zelle.

After going through this, I am still mailing actual paper checks to pay my rent. It is simply easier for everyone involved, and there are no fees.

uggghhh. and these person-to-person services are terrible in the u.s.

I was needed to help pay for a friend in the west coast for rent where the landlord took venmo. venmo denied me for who knows what reason. while this is going on, the landlord tried setting up google wallet (which I had already). I tried sending, but it never transferred (the bank said it was google's fault). I tried another one and it had to do that insert some money into account and read it to me dance which never showed up until later (which by then I gave up).

From what I've heard, countries like Australia are often the trial place for systems like this. So it shouldn't exactly be a surprise or concern that the US doesn't also have these services (yet).

Except that Australia has had this for decades.

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