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Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

federalreserve.gov

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Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#91

Post by nend »

Swizec wrote: post #77
kelnos wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things (probably more) contribute to this, I think: 1) Americans have been trained from birth to distrust government in all forms. Centralizing more and more services triggers a visceral fear response. (IMO it's nonsense, for the most part, but it's there nonetheless.) 2) Being "first to market" with new technologies often means you're just stuck with the sub-optimal first version, while other countries can learn…

> On the flip side, when I'm in Europe, I definitely run into more places that only take cash, which I find annoying to no end. This is mostly for tax evasion reasons and sometimes for employees skimming off the top. The more “proper” a place, the less likely they are to encourage cash transactions. Happens in US too, of course. It’s always the shady places that are cash only and everyone else is digital.

>Happens in US too, of course. It’s always the shady places that are cash only and everyone else is digital.

The US is a big place. Maybe where you are it's like that, but that's not at all accurate where I am.

It's either mom and pop places, or places that have been around for decades that "charmingly" never added support for cards. Both of which are probably less shady than average.

Although the pandemic has forced some of those places to start accepting cards now.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#92

Post by ATsch »

Qworg wrote: post #66
tobinfricke wrote: post #8

Will this be anything like SEPA and the easy, cheap, fast, ubiquitous interbank transfers allowed in Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

Just the B2B part of SEPA.

Kind of typical. Wouldn't want the government to provide any useful service directly to it's citizens without some corporate middleman. Still a very good step though.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#93

Post by peteretep »

pfundstein wrote: post #24

Nearly all first world countries enjoy instant payments at the point of sale and person to person. It boggles my mind that it has taken this long and a pandemic to even set the gears in motion, all while battling ridiculous levels of cheque and credit card fraud.

> Nearly all first world countries

And many poorer countries too -- pretty common here in Thailand to scan a QR code with someone's bank details in it to send them money, bank-to-bank, instantly.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#94

Post by kovek »

lelc wrote: post #84

If anyone from the FED is reading this I have this advice: don't use ISO20022! (I've been working on the brazilian instant payments project, known as PIX). It's an overly-complicated-try-to-solve-everything standard that promises interoperability but only delivers pain and misery. Since each country has its own standards for person and account identification, in dealing with these local realities, the ISO20022 adds q…

What would be an alternative?

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#95

Post by hedora »

geofft wrote: post #43
vxNsr wrote: post #9

> The rapid expenditure of COVID emergency relief payments highlighted the critical importance of having a resilient instant payments infrastructure with nationwide reach, especially for households and small businesses with cash flow constraints," The main issue with releasing cash as I understand it wasn’t that it wasn’t arriving fast enough; rather it was verifying the recipient was eligible and was who they say th…

What's the concern about national ID and political enemies? First, your life is already pretty bad if you don't have either federal or state ID at all. It's hard to drive, it's hard to fly, it's hard to get a paycheck. (You can live off the land in the middle of nowhere and avoid contact with the outside world, but you're not much of a political enemy for anyone if you do.) So, your data is already in some sort of da…

The issue is that the only practical reason to have a national id is to implement a “papers please” society.

The same can be said for databases that keep logs of facial recognition and license plate camera feeds.

(Both are widely deployed in the US, but don’t seem to be usable in cases involving crimes against individuals. I think they’re reserved for “terrorism”, victimless crimes, etc.)

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#96

Post by peteretep »

jperras wrote: post #21

Canadian here. This sounds like Interac eTransfer, which is available to any person sending/receiving money where the endpoints are Canadian banking institutions (all of them, I guess?). We've had this since 2003.

> We've had this since 2003.

As much fun as it is to come up with Canadian supremacy, _everyone_ except the Americans has had this for a long time.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#97

Post by jcrawfordor »

hedora wrote: post #90
jcrawfordor wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may notice, however, that this practice is extremely widespread throughout both the government and private industry. Yes, it is unsuitable for the purpose as parent says, but this is still the de facto purpose. Use of SSNs as identification is so ubiquitous in certain fields that when security concerns around SSNs became apparent in the '90s they were simply replaced with "pseudo-SSNs" which are randomly generate…

SSNs aren’t unique, and were never intended to be.

I'm not arguing with that at all! I'm saying that the fact that they aren't hasn't actually stopped anyone from using them that way.

When this assumption is violated, a psuedo-identifier is assigned. I have worked with multiple systems that work this way and it is the norm in finance and was the norm in higher education until relatively recently. State government information systems also use SSN as primary identifier surprisingly often, and in the system I've worked most closely with reused SSNs were resolved by just deleting the old record.

You could say that SSNs are the perfect storm - they aren't unique, but they're pretty close to unique, and this allows you to rely on SSNs as an identifier for long enough that when you run into a problem you're too dug in and so you find a workaround. For example, assign non-citizens "SSNs" with prefixes not used by SSA---this was the norm in higher ed, and many institutions "eliminated" the use of SSNs by just handling all students as international.

The IRS, of all organizations, uses SSN as a primary means of identifying individuals. They absolutely run into all kinds of problems with this that must be resolved by using other information as well but that doesn't stop them because it's just too convenient. Many such defects in use of SSNs are resolved by assigning an ITIN, which is just a pseudo-SSN with first digit '9' which is not in use by SSA. Even EINs have the same digit length as SSNs, suggesting that they're handled as SSNs by some systems.

Or consider this similar situation: name and DOB are not unique, but this doesn't stop them being near universally used as primary identifier in healthcare information systems. Actually healthcare widely used SSN before HIPPA mandated a change.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#98

Post by cheez »

lelc wrote: post #84

If anyone from the FED is reading this I have this advice: don't use ISO20022! (I've been working on the brazilian instant payments project, known as PIX). It's an overly-complicated-try-to-solve-everything standard that promises interoperability but only delivers pain and misery. Since each country has its own standards for person and account identification, in dealing with these local realities, the ISO20022 adds q…

And I got downvoted for predicting this a few weeks ago.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#99

Post by mrkstu »

amiga_500 wrote: post #20
vxNsr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real ID is very worrying and I’m hopeful that it eventually goes away as it keeps getting delayed.

I just cannot understand how you guys accept bad cops, bad healthcare, bad employment rights, bad social mobility, bad education and bad banks, but apparently national id is where you draw the line. Why didn't you draw the line before all this other stuff that is far behind much of Europe? ------ can't reply directly to the GDP comment as some cry baby has flagged my post and then a free speech loving mod has shadow-…

We make tradeoffs, just like different all different nations, even amongst those in Europe do.

Check out the relative prosperity of the US States individually vs the world:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs...

There are plenty of issues, but all countries have them, the US just tends to get the biggest magnifying glass on theirs.

Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

#100

Post by amluto »

kovek wrote: post #94
lelc wrote: post #84

If anyone from the FED is reading this I have this advice: don't use ISO20022! (I've been working on the brazilian instant payments project, known as PIX). It's an overly-complicated-try-to-solve-everything standard that promises interoperability but only delivers pain and misery. Since each country has its own standards for person and account identification, in dealing with these local realities, the ISO20022 adds q…

What would be an alternative?

A brand new protocol.
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