Most bank transactions here complete within 2 hours (faster payments service) and are completely free.
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.
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.
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...
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!).
[0] : https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/epis...