Anyone moving significant money (> $50-100k) is almost certainly going to want to use a wire.
My guess is wires in USD are very highly correlated with high percentage of total held assets accounts (aka whales).
Both are transactions between US financial institutions, but can be used as the first or last leg of an international transfer (SWIFT or otherwise) through correspondent banking.
2) ACH transactions are 'pull' by their nature. ACH stands for Automated Clearing House, and it was created for checks. Unless denied by the bank being pulled from, all someone needs to withdraw or deposit funds in an account is the routing number and account number. If someone is playing games, that really doesn't require anything. Someone could print checks with that info and just start writing them, for instance, until they get arrested. Wires are send only, direct bank to bank (through the Fed), and are heavily controlled by the banks.
3) Send/Receive limits for ACH (because these are checks) can be arbitrarily low, at the banks discretion. It's not uncommon for it to be $100k/$250k or lower to help limit fraud, and often automated. Wire limits (if any) can be very high, and are generally more a matter of bank policy around authentication, and it's not that unusual for 8 or 9 digit wires to be happening regularly without problems.
If someone is going to be liquidating $10 mln in something, 99.99% of the time it will be handled via wire.
Besides ACH debit, there's also ACH credit transfers, which are "push" payments. I'd assume that this would be what a crypto exchange would use to pay out customer funds.
A separate party (not you) initiates the actual transaction, then the bank either accepts it or doesn’t.
Wire info can only be used to send money OUT. It's sender initiated. You can't initiate a debit of funds from someone's account using the mechanism.
So you can safely give someone wire information without having to worry about someone draining your account with it (and then have to deal with your bank's fraud department trying to claw it back).
Also, if someone receives funds via wire, they can be 99.9%+ sure the funds are theirs and will stay there indefinitely.
Reversing it would require either a major bank error (which happens, but is usually pretty obvious to the recipient), or something like a high profile wire fraud investigation throwing you in jail, or a major court decision to change that.
See [https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...]
If someone receives an inbound ACH transfer, the guarantees are much, much lower, since the sender can just send a reverse transaction and get it back unless the bank stops them.
And then it would be on you to try to get it back, but without their bank account info. Which isn't impossible, but may practically be so.
Whether your bank automatically honors ACH pull payments is a different matter, but given the above, I don't see how providing only your "wire info" would help with fraudulent ACH pulls.
> Also, if someone receives funds via wire, they can be 99.9%+ sure the funds are theirs and will stay there indefinitely.
If somebody hacks my bank account, I don't see how it would be that hard for them to initiate a fraudulent wire transfer. In fact, it's arguably the other way around: Many banks do not even allow their customers to initiate outbound ACH payments to third parties.
> If someone receives an inbound ACH transfer, the guarantees are much, much lower, since the sender can just send a reverse transaction and get it back unless the bank stops them.
It's not nearly that easy for the sending institution to reverse ACH push payments: https://www.nacha.org/rules/reversals-and-enforcement
Most banks (by funds/size) use different wire routing numbers, and sometimes provide deposit only or different account numbers for wires (for high net worth accounts anyway).
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and several others I can name off the top of my head. Only smaller operations don't usually.
Wires (inbound and outbound) have their own departments, and outbound wires require manual confirmation and validation with the account holder for all but a small set of whitelisted individual accounts. For commercial accounts, usually dual release consent (a minimum of two individual accounts with release privilege's must consent before a wire is sent), and/or verbal confirmation with a staffer on the team dealing with wires. If it's a verbal confirmation, they'll confirm all details of the destination, including account #'s and amounts + validate who the confirming party is and that they have appropriate spend authority.
That will often require something like sending corporate charter and the appropriate board consent documents over to the bank beforehand, for example. For larger amounts, expect in person validation.
Your link to the ACH rules there doesn't say what you think it says. It mostly covers attempts at backdating transactions, and 'egregious violations' - aka 500+ bad transactions or transactions adding up to $500K. None of those cover yanking back $50k over a 'dispute'.
Additionally, lawsuit concerns about ACH clawbacks like I described have been handled by adding 'You consent to reversal of transactions we consider done in error' or the like in their TOS or agreements, which covers almost all scenarios.
Really common uses are things like 'oops, we paid you too much - yoink!' in payroll, or 'oh, we didn't mean to actually send you that money just yet - yoink!' then company goes bankrupt, good luck getting your money this year. It used to be not uncommon for some random utility company to bill 10x the right amount from autopay and then spend months returning the money too.
Even more irritating, most banks (especially BofA) will have no problem throwing overdraft fees on your account while sending the money back too.
You can of course always sue the offending party, but that can take awhile, and they might be bankrupt (and no money left) or flat out impossible to find depending on how little they care about felony warrants.
Which, surprisingly, some people don’t seem to care about as much as you’d expect. And felony warrants are not nearly as effective in getting ahold of someone in a timely fashion as one would prefer.
These are public information you can find on the bank's website, i.e. that's an inconvenience for account holders, not a security feature. For my bank, they're also identical.
> and sometimes provide deposit only or different account numbers for wires
If they can do that, they can provide account numbers with ACH pull deactivated just as easily.
It seems like most of the ACH pain points, as well as wire transfer security features like two-party sign-off etc. you describe, revolve around bank policies, not the actual ACH or wire transfer rules.
But nice trying to move the goalposts!
I merely tried to point out that ACH push exists and is practically very similar to wire transfers (in that it's both reasonably final/irreversible, and that an account being set up to receive inbound ACH push/credit payments does not automatically need to honor incoming debit requests).
And I have yet to see an account which can take ACH credits but won’t take ACH debits, as ACH debits are the normal anyway.
It‘s also only possible within five days after an incorrect credit, so if you‘re very concerned about that remote possibility, you can always just wait that long before you consider any incoming "untrusted" funds final.
And if you think that wires can‘t be reversed you should look into the concept of "hold harmless". The practical difference is that many banks automate ACH reversals, while wires need to be manually sent back. But if you think that you can e.g. just keep funds accidentally or fraudulently transferred to your account simply due to the way in which they are sent, you are mistaken.
> And I have yet to see an account which can take ACH credits but won’t take ACH debits
Then you just haven‘t looked. Googling for "ACH debit block" yields several business accounts that support this feature, including Chase.
I’m done going in circles though. Enjoy!
If it's a few days, and I need to move money
1) They've given a heads up so I have time to move it before if needed
2) Assuming my money is in crypto, I can easily move it elsewhere
This isn't to say this isn't strange, and suspect, but the impact seems to be limited.
At the same time, if I were to have a binance account, I'd make sure I also have an account on another exchange.
I feel like this is definitely a lot more than that. Local banks in many countries, along with many online banks allow USD wire transfers that do not get converted. In countries like Sri Lanka, where the local currency is rapidly depreciating, many people actually never withdraw funds to local currency accounts to protect against this.
Wasn't servicing exactly those customers (people without recourse to stable currencies and the international banking system) always the answer to "what do crytocurrencies do well besides speculation and crime?"
Instead the international transfers are generally done via crypto (one thing it does well) and then you "know someone" who will give you cash on the other side (usually in US Dollars).
Over the last few years in Lebanon this has become pretty common:
n absence of a formal framework, traders use a peer-to-peer swapping system, contacting one of a handful of established crypto-to-cash brokers in Lebanon or finding a buyer through social media.
https://www.arabianbusiness.com/money/wealth/alternative-ass...
I don't really understand what the "quiet part" they are referring to is supposed to be.
No, it implies they (or a person they're informally swapping their crypto for cash with) have access to a bank which accepts inbound wire transfers in USD, which is pretty common in economies with weak local currencies, as pointed out above with the example of Sri Lanka. That's a larger, less rich and less American set of people than those with access to a US bank account (who appear to be able to continue to use ACH for withdrawals for now).
Or to put the "quiet part" yet another way, cryptoenthusiasts were suggesting quite different things about numbers of developing world people using crypto (USDT even!) as a store of value when a platform wasn't rugpulling a major cashout route for them...
And that's exactly what crypto does. As far as I'm concerned, the ability to store, send and receive crypto without the consent of a 3rd party is the greatest utility of crypto. Using a 3rd party like Binance or FTX to store, send or otherwise manage your crypto entirely defeats the purpose of crypto. The failures we seen haven't been failures of crypto, they have been spectacular failures of exchanges and 3rd party platforms that frankly nobody with any brains would use. I find the common argument that it is "too complicated" for "normal people" to manage their own wallets ridiculous. If someone isn't willing to put forth the extremely minimal effort to learn how to set up, manage and secure their own wallet then I have very little sympathy when obvious scams like Binance or FTX separate them from their money.