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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

#101

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.

As a general rule, the US is terrible at a lot of first-world things for a good reason: because it was the first (or close).

We have crappy old subways, airports, bridges, skyscrapers, and so on... because we built them early, versions 1.0. And they stuck around.

Other countries had the luxuries of building their versions decades later, when the technology was 2.0 and 3.0 and so on.

So the US is stuck with both old and crappier versions of a lot of stuff, but where it still doesn't make financial sense to rip them out and replace them with the newest.

Our financial system suffers from a lot of similar flaws. E.g. by the time other countries knew enough to base their credit cards on chips+PIN, the US was still stuck with a legacy installed base of stripes+signatures. Money transfers is just one more example.

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

#103

We have this in the UK. It's called Faster Payments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service Never had a problem with it. I use a few banks that are technically good, and I can send a payment from one to the other & get a push notification a couple of seconds after sending cash from one account to another. It's great!

Yeah, we have a similar system called the "New Payments Platform" in Australia. You can use the traditional account/branch identifier numbers, or register a phone number or company number to an account. So people can generally just instantly transfer you money without even asking for details if they have your phone number.

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

#104
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the criticism behind RealIDs and the criticism section on Wikipedia wasn’t helpful. Are passports not basically national IDs? Does it just boil down to blocking illegal immigrants from accessing some services?

Passports are not required to access (pretty much) any Public Service in the US. Passports, Drivers Licenses are optional, as are State IDs. If you _want_ a Federal ID that is accepted by all states, you can certainly get a passport. It's what I often use for ID.

This. Passports are available in card form as well as book form too so you can carry a passport card in your wallet with your state ID. I have no plans to get a "Real ID" driver's license since I already have a passport card.

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

#105
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US has means of instant payments, it's just not standard across banks. There's lots of way other countries are far behind as well (like Canada having banks that still charge for every transaction you make).

I wouldn’t say Canada is “far behind” because the banks like to rip people off. We’ve had a single unified payment network for like 40 years. We’ve had instantly settled electronic transfers (Interac e-Transfer) exposed to consumers directly through their institutions for about 20 years. We’ve had chip and pin and NFC contactless payments for quite a long time. And the rip off is really just the handful of big banks.…

The US has a unified payment system (ACH) and has had it for many decades it's just not instant, usually takes 3 business days for a transaction to fully settle.

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

#106
What I really want this payment system to do is eliminate the direct debit system from checking accounts and return some real security to banking. Secure, irrevocable payments, only initiated by me, from my account to others.

No more system that allows mistake debits or others to accidentally/maliciously deduct from my checking account, such that I have to be watching for errors and ask for them to be fixed. Or wondering if someone's payment to me might be reversed. Or having my (or your) parents fall victim to an advance fee scam with bounced checks 2 weeks after deposit. Ridiculous.

It's well past time for this. Or at least now give me the choice to have those loopholes eliminated from my checking account.

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

#107
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…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name. [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name.

If it was a national ID, it would be mandatory. Real ID is optional.

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

#108

We have this in the UK. It's called Faster Payments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster_Payments_Service Never had a problem with it. I use a few banks that are technically good, and I can send a payment from one to the other & get a push notification a couple of seconds after sending cash from one account to another. It's great!

Yeah, we have a similar system called the "New Payments Platform" in Australia. You can use the traditional account/branch identifier numbers, or register a phone number or company number to an account. So people can generally just instantly transfer you money without even asking for details if they have your phone number.

Under the hood, it is currently significantly more expensive than BECS however.

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

#110
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…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name. [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf

Not really anymore than drivers licenses are.

The Real ID Act just sets a standard for "enhanced" drivers licenses that will also be accepted by various government agencies as "verified ID".

Each state still has their own databases of drivers licenses and you can still get the original IDs without the extra verification step (basically proof of address and immigration status).

Before Real ID, you pretty much just told them your address and they didn't care that much about immigration status (as long as you were legal). NOTE: this varied by states considerably - some states were already doing many of these things before the Real ID Act (they just were doing it their own way).

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