How ACH works: A developer perspective (2014)

Today my bank sent me a note saying that ACH payments for both credit and debit cards will only take 1 day to process.

They talk about this a little in part 3:

> An addendum to the ACH protocol to support same-day ACH settlement is something that is almost unanimously desired by the ACH community. The good news is that NACHA, the governing organization behind ACH, has recently announced plans to roll out a same-day ACH protocol. The challenge is coordinating the adoption of the new protocol across all participating banks. Once fully implemented, the same-day ACH system would likely cut one day from the timelines outlined here.

http://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-persp...

I had an integrator request this so I stood up a nodeJS server that only implements upload, not download. This way if they leaked their own password, a malicious actor is limited to forging data, and no real data can be leaked. Because it didn't work in FileZilla, they didn't want to use it. Worked at another company that shuffled data between big name gyms & health insurance companies, it also used CSV files sent over FTP in all directions, to my dismay. CSV isn't even a well defined format, and you get all kinds of impedance mismatches with different delimiter & escaping mechanisms, character encodings, BOM, etc. Other companies will just give you a SQL user & let you go to town mining their database directly. I don't understand whats so difficult about making an API, but sometimes it seems like no one wants to do it. You can't push back too much or they will just see you as a problem & decide not to integrate with you.

At least it's secure and usually FTPS...hopefully using TLS 1.2+ cryptographic protocol.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636066

Totally more secure, less error prone, and faster than a blockchain. /s