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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never received $7M but a few times I’ve handled large sums (when buying a house and previous startup exit) and it felt so weird to be how completely normal it was. Like just… oh yeah go ahead and write a cheque for six figures. Or do an e-transfer into your chequing account for six figures. It felt like… no there has to be a whole special world for large sums, no?

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I'm sure there is special handling for large sums... but six figures isn't it. Businesses routinely write checks for half a million dollars, two million dollars... it's perfectly normal to see such amounts within the banking world. There might be some extra scrutiny on the back end that you don't see, but since it's well within the realm of normal operations that the bank sees happen every day, it's nothing special.

Now, eight or nine figures, that's probably going to pass the threshold for special attention. As in, you might be required to go to the bank in person with photo ID in order to authorize the transaction, that sort of thing. But under 10 million U.S. dollars? Many businesses will handle those amounts monthly, and the bank is used to seeing them.

It depends on the part of the system you are talking about. Under the covers, many a system will send reports higher up for 5 figure transfers, just for money laundering detection. And there will be all kinds of things blaring for anomaly detection. It's not the same if an account that normally moves large sums, and has been cleared and "explained lol moves a large amount than if it's one making nothing. See, for instance, how Notch's PayPal account was flagged when suddenly the game started to do great sales. So the special attention will vary, and there might be a human involved at some point even if they don't call you.

As a ‘normal’ person it sure feels weird sending (or receiving) a purchase order or invoice for six figures though.

Oh, sure. What's normal for the bank sure isn't normal for most individuals. I see that someone misread my comment to the point of writing a presumably-angry message that got flagged (so I'm only guessing what it contained), so I wanted to clarify: that sure isn't the daily, or weekly, experience for most people. It's just the bank that sees such sums all the time.

And someone else correctly pointed out that there might indeed be extra scrutiny on such transactions, at a level you might not always see, e.g. when Notch suddenly started receiving tons of money from Minecraft sales, PayPal flagged the account for special attention. But then they figured out it was legitimate, and allowed the money to go through. Personally, having been on the receiving end of credit card fraud (which I caught early enough that the bank refunded me the two fraudulent transactions, a total of $300), I'm glad that "this looks funny" gets flagged. It causes me more inconvenience than it has saved me money: every time I try to buy airline tickets back home (I live and work overseas) it's a large enough transaction that it gets flagged, and I have to call the bank and say "Yes, that large purchase on (airline) is legit, please let it through next time when I try again". But it saves me from being on the hook for $2,500 if someone were to get hold of my CC number again.

Banking regulation varies from country to country, where I'm from a regular personal account isn't usually allowed to directly transfer more than a few tens of thousands of dollars per month. Anything beyond that is handled by the bank itself. Business accounts work differently.

I'm certain receiving a lump six figure sum on my personal account would trigger a review, if only because the taxman wants to know about it.

Backend-wise, it's just different sets of flags. The infrastructure is the same.

In Spain, if you try to casually use your bank app to transfer a big amount, you hit a limit. If you need to do that, you can go to a bank office or do a phone call, tell them, and they will temporarily lift the limit, and then yes, you can just go to your regular everyday app and type the large amount and it will work. Doesn't it work like that where you are?

Reminds me of when a guy earned like a million off of cryptocurrency, but the cash was in a foreign account (the exchange, I presume). He couldn't just transfer it to his own account because the bank had issues with it. He opened a new account with another bank that had no issue accepting it, and transferred it from there to his main bank which suddenly also had no problem with it lol.

I think generally speaking, there's two systems; the one is a scam / self protection system that disallows large transfers but the user can disable it themselves, the other is something that works after the fact that looks for things like money laundering and tax evasion, but these processes run nightly, yearly, or maybe even once a year. I'm half expecting a tax bill for some unreported crypto assets abroad, half because it's only a few hundred worth.

In the US there is ACH transfers which are free and slow and reversible and wire transfers which are expensive and fast and normally irreversible. Fednow is a new fast payment system.

What is it like when billionaires sell like $10 billion worth of shares? Do you need a special bank account to hold that much?

At that point, there's an IB team handling the deal, an LLC holding the money, and probably several banks holding its accounts. Few banks are happy to handle that kind of concentration in a retail sight account.

Is it even possible to hold that much in a regular checking account?

I'm guessing at those sizes the bank holding that much of your stuff becomes a risk for them so they have someone you can talk to directly to smooth over any potential problems

yes, you can't stick with a 32 bit account any more, needs 64.

When I worked on banking systems for analyzing demand deposit accounts and ledgers we used Snowflake's NUMBER type

Money should never be stored using floating point variables. That is why the Decimal type exists and why IBM Mainframes have hardware acceleration for binary coded decimal math.

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