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Comment by itcrowd | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for the RTP information! Had not heard of it yet. The fees look very reasonable ($0.01-$0.045 depending on type of transaction) and they provide a level playing field (flat-fee, no discounts for volume)

I also heard someone say at some point that Americans are very wary of having people transfer money to their bank account. Not sure what the rationale is (maybe taxes or afraid of criminal money?) but I was wondering if you have heard this and if so, whether RTP has some protections or safeguards against this?

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Historically Americans have been wary of handing out their bank account information because that's all the information needed for a bad actor to issue an ACH debit and pull money from your account. The NACHA guidelines have very strict rules around this and the payment protections are rather strong but it's still a pain to deal with as a consumer. RTP itself is non-reversible so when someone sends you an RTP payment it clears instantly and can never be pulled back as it can with Check and ACH payments.

You hand out your bank account information every time you give somebody a check

And indeed that's one reason (of many) I don't like to write checks. But I'd still argue that the threat model from giving a physical check to someone you know or do business with is different from linking your bank account with some online service like Venmo, where any mass breach or vulnerability might result in a wide array of people now having access to my banking information. And even if my bank covers me in the case of fraud, they don't compensate me for the domino effect problems that can come from having bill payments bounce because the account was emptied.

To be clear I'm not arguing that this is a good system, but as long as it is the system we have, it's wise to limit who you give your banking account information to, regardless of channel.

This is exactly why Donald Knuth doesn't give out checks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth_reward_check

Many banks have different values for the check MICR account numbers vs ACH routing purely to avoid easily spoofed ACH requests.

my bank prints out paper checks but they seem to xfer the money through another company. money leaves my bank account, but the checks, when delivered, have a completely different routing and account number. doesn't matter to me, but I had a paper check payment I needed to return and the local branch couldn't help me at all - the floor guy there couldn't even understand my situation. there was an 800 number on the check to call and I explained and they cancelled that check.

> I also heard someone say at some point that Americans are very wary of having people transfer money to their bank account.

All it takes to extract money from my bank account is the routing and account numbers. Print a fake check with that info, take a couple crappy photos with one of those mobile deposit apps, and boom my money is gone. This happened to me just a couple years ago. The signature on the check was literally "John Hancock." Perhaps things have improved in the past couple years, but I doubt it.

As for replacement programs, I trust banks no further than I can throw them. You want me to sign up for Zelle, or whatever new money transfer program is? What's the catch? No way I'm trusting any program introduced by a bank.

You can't transfer money between banks in US Dollars within the US for free?

We really are blessed with SEPA¹.

Still, a few cents sounds at least reasonable.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

I had this random thought, I wonder if it holds water:

The EU states are (fairly) confident in their status as independent countries, and thus dare subject themselves to and implement such things as SEPA.

While the U.S. is a single country, the states within are not independent countries and, very aware of that, try to defend their independence within the union at every turn.

I'm not sure it's the independence being defended so much as local grift of one form or another.

Most times, the financial institution will eat the ACH fee, so to the customer it looks like it's free.

SEPA also doesn't mean that the transactions are free, either. According to a third party transfer service (https://transferwise.com/help/15/paying-for-your-transfer/29...) there might still be some fees from banks.

If you do commercial SEPA Transfers, yes there are fees. If you only do push transactions (ie, customers sends SEPA transaction to you), it's largely account management fees.

The pull transaction (SEPA Debit) isn't free, you can buy transaction packets (usually around 5-15€ per 1000 transactions) as well as paying a fee on monthly cash inflow (usually around 0.1-0.3%). Honestly, it's peanuts.

Naturally the UK banks found a way to charge consumers for SEPA payments.

SEPA can be free for customer but participating banks and payment institutions pay per transaction.

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