Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth
digitaltransactions.net
digitaltransactions.net
Most bank transactions here complete within 2 hours (faster payments service) and are completely free.
It really is terrible though and has been for a long time.
The point of change in EU was legally mandated changes (PSD) which (after a transition period, something like 2 years maybe?) essentially required banks to deliver payments within a certain time or compensate the payer for any losses/costs caused by the delay, at which point suddenly the private industry managed to quickly solve all the technical and organizational problems that were impossible before.
I do keep hearing about "Same Day ACH" which was rolled out and phases and phase 3 was supposed to be done on March 16, 2018.
https://www.nacha.org/rules/same-day-ach-moving-payments-fas...
No wonder when anything even slightly better appears, people jump on it.
For comparison, a SEPA transfer in the EU costs around 1 EUR, gets done within a single business day, and account numbers have checksums, so you can't easily make a mistake.
That's ... expensive? In .de it's usually free for consumers with online banks, around 10 ct for business accounts ...
Also, wires can't be reversed (generally). If that's a good or a bad thing is dependent on the transaction and transactors.
Big banks will have the money next business day at the latest, Tiny correspondent banks in alaska might be as far behind as an extra day or two.
There's a class of return that's supposed to come within 3 days, (NSF/No Account/Closed Account) that's usually what the banks are waiting for, but fraud related returns can be up to 60 calendars later by the rules.
In the EU, I put my bank account numbers on every invoice, which makes sense, because I want people to transfer money to me. I would never imagine that knowing my account number would allow someone to take money from me.
Combine that with bank apps that allow you to take a photo of a check to deposit it and, well, game over.
There are also lots of places that will let you pay bills by giving them just the routing number and account number, which are all that are needed to initiate an ACH debit.
The US is way behind the rest of the first world when it comes to payment tech.
I find it fascinating that the much saner situations in the EU are never mentioned. Perhaps I need a more diverse source of news on this topic.
Wire transfers are different than ACH transfers. Wire transfers cost money and take less than one business day. ACH transfers are inexpensive* and generally take in the ballpark of five business days.
* They are inexpensive for the bank. At banks that treat their customers fairly, they're generally free because the cost accounting is generally more than the cost of performing the transfer. At shitty banks, (BofA, Wells Fargo, etc) they're arbitrarily expensive.
I think they've reported on ACH a few times each year and there never seems to be any incentive (from the group maintaining ACH) to improve it. What's worse is that it not only takes a few days, I often don't see it show up until a few days after that (back dated to when it was supposed to be received!).
VCs in the US were amazed when we told them that SPEI transfers costed $.4 USD and the money was moved in 15 minutes or less.
Fast forward years later I work in a company that uses ACH, I have came to know some of its internals, and man how bad it is... taking up to 5 days to clear a transaction, and never really giving you an ACK signal (but you have to wait and pray not to get a NACK).
Sometimes the USA surprises me the bad way.
[0] : https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/epis...
https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Administrative-...
With that said, it'd be swank to move as much paper checking activity to ACH as possible for efficiency reasons, as well as credit card activity to ACH to de-financialize payments (finance absorbs too much of GDP IMHO).
In general, more people covered by public and/or private insurance means more insurer to provider payments.
Well, I mean, that depends on the shape of reform. If you mean what the ACA did, no.
Medicare for All? Maybe.
> As you're cutting out all of the admin overhead, billing here and there, everywhere.
A significant share, as I understand it, of that cross-billing is to get an official denial from a higher-priority payer to show to another payer; my intuition would be that more coverage and security of payments would, even in a move to single payer, increase final number of payments unless actual payments are grouped and consolidated rather than paid individually as approved.
The reason that it’s next day is that for most banks, the process of doing an ACH transfer is to effectively SFTP a file with the amount to transfer and account details to the receiving bank, and they batch process them nightly.
Also, with this system, there is no difference between a direct deposit and direct withdrawal. One just has a negative transfer balance. So once you approve someone such as your employer to direct deposit they can also withdraw from your account with no warning.
It pains me that a system so shitty powers the world financial market... that’s what you get from monopolies.
For folks with reasonable transaction volumes per year I highly recommend both this, electronic payment systems and positive pay.
Frankly, the US financial infrastructure is abysmal - we've papered things over for a long time. I'm happy to be currently working on fixing it.
ACH transfers are not same day by default, and definitely not near-instant. However some of the consumer visible services offer immediate delivery, while still using normal "slow" ACH in the backend. Typically this is done via another network that verifies that the funds are available, and that the ACH transaction has been submitted. If both are verified, the receiving institution can be fairly confident they will get the money, and will make it available immediately.
For more immediate and irrevocable transfers, wire transfers are used. The Fedwire system for example, allows banks to directly transfer funds from their Federal Reserve deposits to each other. The sending bank ensures that the sender has the available money and debits it, while the receiver bank gets notice from the federal reserve that the transfer is complete and credits the receiver account. Obviously the banks can also use this system to directly settle any debt that they owe to the other bank, since federal reserve balances are legally equivalent to cash in the vault.
The US does not have any system quite like the UK's faster payments system. In the US there is basically an unwritten rule that no consumer should ever actually see the account number of a company or other consumer except when printed on a physical paper check.
So the closest we've gotten to the faster payments system is the Zelle payment network, which unlike Paypal or Venmo is a service offer directly by the bank, but abstracts away account numbers by using phone number or email addresses. Zelle does offer immediate settlement from the consumer's perspective. This system is far from universally implemented right now, and still only works for consumer to consumer payments.
For bank's billpay services, they end up using ACH if they have an agreement with the biller, or otherwise create and mail a physical paper check!
Basically the US payments systems are still stuck back in the 1990s.
If you're a business, I think you can get up to a $100k/mo limit - not enough to run most firms.
Used to take a few days until Faster Payments got implemented, free of charge and dates from 1968 best I can tell.
The Zelle systems don’t seem to allow periodic payments and the maximum amount is well below that needed to make a Bay Area rent payment.
Wayback machine has it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190404230059/http://www.digita...
I joked that it was originally designed for delivery by telegraph. I'm still not convinced I was wrong.