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My first job in 2005 was to take over an ACH processing system that was written for our company. It was all in Perl. :-P ACH format is super weird .. tons of l

My first job in 2005 was to take over an ACH processing system that was written for our company. It was all in Perl. :-P ACH format is super weird .. tons of lines with 99999 on them as separators. And yes, we had to go through a bank to do any ACH transactions. They shipped us a router that setup an IPSec tunnel and it had a backup ISDN connection on it as well. I wish ACH was more accessible. In many other countries, you give people your Name, Bank and Account number (Australia: BSB + Acct, NZ: it's one big number) and people can just send you money. Appears the next day, even on holidays. In the US we still have to photo checks with a phone app? WTF? I wrote a thing about our banking system here: http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is-still-in-the-1990s/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is...

geomark 9y ago
As an American expat living in a developing country it seems very weird to me how backwards the US ACH system is. Where I live now it's the same as the countries you mentioned, anyone can send money to your bank account using just the account number. And it appears in minutes. The banks even offer you an SMS alert when founds arrive and the sender can elect to send an SMS to alert the receiver to check their account for the received funds. Everyone uses it, including many (most?) businesses.
- geon 9y ago
  Swish in Sweden?
  - kpil 9y ago
    Swish allows to send using an arbitrary number (phone or arbitrarily assigned) rather than an actual account number. It's also credits the recipient immediately. That's possible since all the participating banks have deposited a number of billions in a mutual fund designed to cover the losses in the case one of the banks runs out of money, and also probably by having an internal account to debit during the day. They are tranfering money between the banks at one (or maybe a few) standard clearing runs involving the Riksbank, that works more or less like ACH. I think all of them are scheduled in the morning. All Swedish banks are working onreplacing the payment infrastructure (the clearing. ) It's supposed to be finished in 2024 or something like that.
    - piva00 9y ago
      Sounds about right from my experience working at Klarna.
- kqr 9y ago
  From what I understand, the desire for instantaneous transactions is has an inverse relation with how much money you have. Poorer countries are generally way, way ahead in mobile banking, because in a rich country you are supposed to keep around a month's salary in all your accounts, making transfers less urgent.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    The way I understand it, it's a coordination issue - the bigger a market is, the longer it takes for a big change to be adopted by everyone. Plausible stories are easy to make up. Lots of countries - probably most - with higher GDP per capita than the US have lower latency banking. The US has a large proportion of people who are worse off than the equivalents in many poorer countries, too.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      That, and how much existing infrastructure there is. Many places leapfrogged directly to mobile phones (featurephones mostly) because there were little to no power and/or landline wiring present (and attempts at getting such infrastructure in place got disrupted by people stealing the wiring and selling it as scrap copper).
    - sah2ed 9y ago
      Your perspective describes the underlying issue much clearly than those who talk about "leapfrogging". The newer platforms (like mobile banking) were adopted in those (poorer) markets because they were cheaper to deploy relative to the technology that preceeded them, and perhaps more importantly, they had less inertia to overcome (against entrenched interests).
kennydude 9y ago
In the UK we have "faster payments" and money these days typically appears in about 15 minutes or so
- Rjevski 9y ago
  Even less that that. Yesterday I tried sending money from Starling Bank to Monzo and it literally took a few seconds.
- diroussel 9y ago
  Faster payments was mandated by the European Payment Services Directive. All European countries have it. Up next: Payment Services Directive 2 - API access to bank accounts. This is going to be interesting.
  - disiplus 9y ago
    its still not impelemnted everywhere, in croatia the exchange between banks is happening twice a day, i believe at 12h and 17h. alot of people here dont like to buy stuff with CC so they transfer the money with internet banking, and also get a discount because that is treated as cash, and if the webshop is with another bank you have to wait to get a confirmation they received the money, or can try to send them transaction confirmation in PDF. sometimes its anoying when you are ordering something expenensive and have to wait a bit longer because only after your payment do they order it from the distributor.
  - lucaspiller 9y ago
    Any idea why the UK is still allowed to charge so much for outgoing Euro payments? It's reduced a lot, but my UK bank still charges £9 + their poor exchange rate.
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      I phoned up my bank and asked them how they calculate their fees and the exchange rate on foreign transactions. Needless to say, they couldn't give me an answer.
martin_bech 9y ago
In Denmark its instant, as in realtime, as in you buy my user car, transfer money through your bank app, and see it instantly in my bank app.
- photonios 9y ago
  Yeap, in the Netherlands as well. You can see the money being subtracted in almost real-time when you buy stuff in a store.
timClicks 9y ago
New Zealand banks now process inter-bank payments on the same day.
- iagovar 9y ago
  1 day aprox in Spain, but depends in the bank. Some of them are quicker.
lucaspiller 9y ago
In most of Europe (UK and IE are one exception still using SWIFT) you just need the IBAN (international bank account number). In a lot of cases the payment is instant, even between countries, and free. Unlike the US the bank account number shouldn't be guarded with your life, so businesses often have it listed on their website.
- jandrese 9y ago
  US Bank account numbers aren't proprietary knowledge. They're written in plaintext on the bottom of every check.
  - DoubleCribble 9y ago
    And that's a problem. Here's the discussion from last year.[0] [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833009
wiredfool 9y ago
The weirdness is historical. The '9'*94 padding and the line lengths are basically holdovers from when the ACH format was constrained by the capacity of 9 track tapes.
jdmichal 9y ago
The major US banks created clearXchange to solve this problem, which was later sold and now rebranded to Zelle. It's near-instantaneous transfers for supported banks, and only needs a phone number or email address. (I think it's quaint in comparison that you need to give out your bank account number for other systems. Holding of account numbers is exactly the problem that modern mobile wallets worked so hard to solve with tokenization.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearXchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearXchange I consider it a huge marketing failure that this is such a little known capability.
- joncrocks 9y ago
  The difference is, however, that you can assign a bank account a number that is unique within a given banking system. Once you move into the realm of trying to tie an identifier you have no control over (and that has no reliable verification method for) to a place where money will go, you open yourself up to a smorgasbord of potential attack vectors, confusions and edge cases.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    Bank account numbers are not unique across banks. Account number schemes aren't even uniform across banks. The only limitation is what fits within the ACH system. You need the combination of routing number (to identify the bank) and account number (to identify the individual within the bank). Zelle associates the bank account to a email address and / or phone number. Creation of these associations is gated through the member banks. So you have all the controls you have for any other banking task.
    - ihattendorf 9y ago
      If all you need is a phone number to pay, how does it handle multiple accounts? Or can you only sign up for a single account?
      - jdmichal 9y ago
        It's a 1:1 association. When I changed banks and tried to sign up online, it kept giving me an error. I stopped by a branch, and my old bank had registered me at some point. The teller had to call support and remove my previous association before they could create the new one. Also, the association is to receive, not to send. Sending is initiated by your bank, which obviously already knows your account number. You send from your bank account to an email or phone number, which Zelle then translates to the target bank account.

geomark 9y ago

As an American expat living in a developing country it seems very weird to me how backwards the US ACH system is. Where I live now it's the same as the countries you mentioned, anyone can send money to your bank account using just the account number. And it appears in minutes. The banks even offer you an SMS alert when founds arrive and the sender can elect to send an SMS to alert the receiver to check their account for the received funds. Everyone uses it, including many (most?) businesses.

geon 9y ago
Swish in Sweden?
- kpil 9y ago
  Swish allows to send using an arbitrary number (phone or arbitrarily assigned) rather than an actual account number. It's also credits the recipient immediately. That's possible since all the participating banks have deposited a number of billions in a mutual fund designed to cover the losses in the case one of the banks runs out of money, and also probably by having an internal account to debit during the day. They are tranfering money between the banks at one (or maybe a few) standard clearing runs involving the Riksbank, that works more or less like ACH. I think all of them are scheduled in the morning. All Swedish banks are working onreplacing the payment infrastructure (the clearing. ) It's supposed to be finished in 2024 or something like that.
  - piva00 9y ago
    Sounds about right from my experience working at Klarna.
kqr 9y ago
From what I understand, the desire for instantaneous transactions is has an inverse relation with how much money you have. Poorer countries are generally way, way ahead in mobile banking, because in a rich country you are supposed to keep around a month's salary in all your accounts, making transfers less urgent.
- barrkel 9y ago
  The way I understand it, it's a coordination issue - the bigger a market is, the longer it takes for a big change to be adopted by everyone. Plausible stories are easy to make up. Lots of countries - probably most - with higher GDP per capita than the US have lower latency banking. The US has a large proportion of people who are worse off than the equivalents in many poorer countries, too.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    That, and how much existing infrastructure there is. Many places leapfrogged directly to mobile phones (featurephones mostly) because there were little to no power and/or landline wiring present (and attempts at getting such infrastructure in place got disrupted by people stealing the wiring and selling it as scrap copper).
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    Your perspective describes the underlying issue much clearly than those who talk about "leapfrogging". The newer platforms (like mobile banking) were adopted in those (poorer) markets because they were cheaper to deploy relative to the technology that preceeded them, and perhaps more importantly, they had less inertia to overcome (against entrenched interests).

kennydude 9y ago

In the UK we have "faster payments" and money these days typically appears in about 15 minutes or so

Rjevski 9y ago
Even less that that. Yesterday I tried sending money from Starling Bank to Monzo and it literally took a few seconds.
diroussel 9y ago
Faster payments was mandated by the European Payment Services Directive. All European countries have it. Up next: Payment Services Directive 2 - API access to bank accounts. This is going to be interesting.
- disiplus 9y ago
  its still not impelemnted everywhere, in croatia the exchange between banks is happening twice a day, i believe at 12h and 17h. alot of people here dont like to buy stuff with CC so they transfer the money with internet banking, and also get a discount because that is treated as cash, and if the webshop is with another bank you have to wait to get a confirmation they received the money, or can try to send them transaction confirmation in PDF. sometimes its anoying when you are ordering something expenensive and have to wait a bit longer because only after your payment do they order it from the distributor.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  Any idea why the UK is still allowed to charge so much for outgoing Euro payments? It's reduced a lot, but my UK bank still charges £9 + their poor exchange rate.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    I phoned up my bank and asked them how they calculate their fees and the exchange rate on foreign transactions. Needless to say, they couldn't give me an answer.

martin_bech 9y ago

In Denmark its instant, as in realtime, as in you buy my user car, transfer money through your bank app, and see it instantly in my bank app.

photonios 9y ago
Yeap, in the Netherlands as well. You can see the money being subtracted in almost real-time when you buy stuff in a store.

timClicks 9y ago

New Zealand banks now process inter-bank payments on the same day.

iagovar 9y ago
1 day aprox in Spain, but depends in the bank. Some of them are quicker.

lucaspiller 9y ago

In most of Europe (UK and IE are one exception still using SWIFT) you just need the IBAN (international bank account number). In a lot of cases the payment is instant, even between countries, and free. Unlike the US the bank account number shouldn't be guarded with your life, so businesses often have it listed on their website.

jandrese 9y ago
US Bank account numbers aren't proprietary knowledge. They're written in plaintext on the bottom of every check.
- DoubleCribble 9y ago
  And that's a problem. Here's the discussion from last year.[0] [0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833009

wiredfool 9y ago

The weirdness is historical. The '9'*94 padding and the line lengths are basically holdovers from when the ACH format was constrained by the capacity of 9 track tapes.

jdmichal 9y ago

The major US banks created clearXchange to solve this problem, which was later sold and now rebranded to Zelle. It's near-instantaneous transfers for supported banks, and only needs a phone number or email address. (I think it's quaint in comparison that you need to give out your bank account number for other systems. Holding of account numbers is exactly the problem that modern mobile wallets worked so hard to solve with tokenization.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearXchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearXchange I consider it a huge marketing failure that this is such a little known capability.

joncrocks 9y ago
The difference is, however, that you can assign a bank account a number that is unique within a given banking system. Once you move into the realm of trying to tie an identifier you have no control over (and that has no reliable verification method for) to a place where money will go, you open yourself up to a smorgasbord of potential attack vectors, confusions and edge cases.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  Bank account numbers are not unique across banks. Account number schemes aren't even uniform across banks. The only limitation is what fits within the ACH system. You need the combination of routing number (to identify the bank) and account number (to identify the individual within the bank). Zelle associates the bank account to a email address and / or phone number. Creation of these associations is gated through the member banks. So you have all the controls you have for any other banking task.
  - ihattendorf 9y ago
    If all you need is a phone number to pay, how does it handle multiple accounts? Or can you only sign up for a single account?
    - jdmichal 9y ago
      It's a 1:1 association. When I changed banks and tried to sign up online, it kept giving me an error. I stopped by a branch, and my old bank had registered me at some point. The teller had to call support and remove my previous association before they could create the new one. Also, the association is to receive, not to send. Sending is initiated by your bank, which obviously already knows your account number. You send from your bank account to an email or phone number, which Zelle then translates to the target bank account.