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Comment by srmatto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

India has instantaneous IMPS bank transfers.

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