Apple Savings Account Customers Say It’s Hard to Get Their Money Out | Hacker News Reader

Apple Savings Account Customers Say It’s Hard to Get Their Money Out

wsj.com

20 pointsmfiguiere11 comments

It's a very strange account - I tried to set up my auto loan to withdraw from Apple Savings, but it just didn't work.

When I deposit money from my bank, it takes a full week for it to be available for withdrawal.

Oddly, I have my employer put $20 into it every pay period (honestly on a lark), and it showed up on the expected date, and was available for withdrawal.

It might be an issue with your non-Apple/GS bank? Bank-to-bank ACH transfers are an interesting and sometimes convoluted process and some banks are slower at it than others. (Anecdotally, my deposits in the Apple Savings account from a checking account at my other bank seem to apply effectively immediately.)

The ACH transaction goes in the morning or evening batch file and that should be that.

Malleability in funds availability is just business logic of the credit union or bank after that, not a slowdown in the ACH system.

Deposits from Chase via ACH happen overnight for me and are available for withdrawal pretty much as soon as they land in Apple Savings.

Mine was with Wells Fargo - trying to get automated withdrawals from Apple Savings to Wells.

I decided to try again today, we'll see.

American Express Savings also takes one full week to complete manually-initiated deposits into their savings accounts.

https://archive.ph/aEDVt

Not your keys, not your fiat?

"It is reasonable that a bank would delay a transfer to do enhanced due diligence, but the length of the delay in these cases is surprising, said Dennis Lormel, who worked on financial crimes for the U.S. government for three decades and now is a bank consultant."

I love how the default is to assume people are guilty of some sort of transgression for a bank transfer of their own money.

I think a key underlying differentiator here is the class of account: in old world bank accounts I expect a lot more diligence in transfers out of a Savings Account than say a Checking Account, and this Apple account is entirely branded and labeled a Savings Account, so this all tracks with my understanding of how the account is supposed to work.

(And yeah, even if you are the one initiating the transfer for your own accounts, it might still be a coerced action and an attempt at fraud. Some due diligence there isn't the worst thing for what is intended to be an infrequently withdrawn account by account type.)

> (And yeah, even if you are the one initiating the transfer for your own accounts, it might still be a coerced action and an attempt at fraud. Some due diligence there isn't the worst thing for what is intended to be an infrequently withdrawn account by account type.)

The difference being that I'd expect coercion or fraud to be after the fact (clawbacks), not up front denial of access.

I don't know, they say that a lot of coercion/fraud has an "immediacy" to it, either real or imagined, and in which cases (artificially) slowing things down can have a good chance at catching bad actors or giving smart people time to think outside of the "immediacy" pressure and realize that the immediacy may be a lie and that they've been caught in some sort of a scam. It can help them get out of the situation if they can blame a slow bank.

I certainly can see many uses for slower withdrawals from a Savings Account. (Even when the withdrawal is not coerced or a scam, too. Slower withdrawals may slow down other sorts of reckless decisions, too.)

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