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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

#201
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the concern about national ID and political enemies? Because America has seen what happens when it's used in other countries. The HN crowd is mostly too young to remember these sorts of things, or to have learned about them in school. But it's a very short ride from "What's the big deal with national IDs?" to "SELECT * FROM 'residents' WHERE 'religion' = 'jewish' ORDER BY 'national_id';"

I answered that objection already, I thought. If you want to find every Cohen in the country, you can do so from state driver's licenses, birth certificates, voter registration data (which is public!), tax records, E-Verify, social security, whatever. If you want to find everyone who's traveled to a "terrorist" nation in the last few years, USCIS already has that data.

Sure, the government rounding up people by religion is bad and worth protecting against. I do not follow the argument that blocking a national ID actually protects against this in any meaningful way.

(Also, uh, don't put a religion field in your national ID?)

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

#202
post #95
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

This thread started off with a very practical reason to have a national ID - the ability to authenticate who receives COVID relief checks. My question was in response to someone who believed that this was a legitimate purpose for a national ID and was nonetheless concerned about them.

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

#203

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.

It always feels like going back in time whenever an American requests a cheque. I haven't filled one in for over 15 years at this stage.

I don't use them very often but they still serve a purpose. You don't have to know the payment details for the receiving party, just their name. You don't need an electronic device or an internet connection.

Of course you have to be more mindful about fraud when accepting one but in many scenarios they prove quite useful.

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

#204
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…

I'm also working with Brazilian instant payments schema, aka PIX. We've simply created a mapping layer to convert all ISO messaging to json. Internally all our logic runs on json. It works because at the end of the day, payments only need a few fields to work: Source, Destination, Amount.

Quite scary to run financial transactions using an untyped format.

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

#205
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banking in general and international banking, predate the US London, Glasgow, Budapest and Paris all have metro systems that predate the New York Subway There are multiple bridges that are still in use that predate European colonization of North America While the oldest airport is in the US, (College Park), Hamburg, Bucharest, Bremen, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Sydney all follow very shortly after AFAICT Skyscrapers is…

I have always been under the impression it is because the US wasn't bombed to bits during WWII and didn't basically get to re-think infrastructure.

Based on things like the Chicago Fire and the SF Quake, it seems (at least anecdotally) clear that massive destruction has a positive effect on infrastructure down the road.

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

#206
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…

I'm also working with Brazilian instant payments schema, aka PIX. We've simply created a mapping layer to convert all ISO messaging to json. Internally all our logic runs on json. It works because at the end of the day, payments only need a few fields to work: Source, Destination, Amount.

>json

I hope you aren't using floats for cents!

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not if you want to travel by air.

That's an abusive attempt at a workaround by the Fed to make it mandatory.

Thankfully, it appears my state will continue to offer the same IDs it always has in addition to the "enhanced" ones. I suppose I'll have to start using my passport for domestic flights in 2021.

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

#208
post #152
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure they at least authenticate the sftp connection for the ach transfers.

Yes, for the bank I deal with, we GPG encrypt and sign the ACH transfer file, and then we send across scp/sftp where both sides have known public keys. Both are rotated regularly. I imagine many banks operate similarly, but I can't say that for certain.

I'm curious if the GPG signature is properly checked. There is no easy way to validate a GPG signature (ie fail if the file is not signed by X), you have to use a verbose machine mode and look for a specific string. GPG will happily decrypt a non signed file also, so there are many ways to misuse GPG, and many of them are SO top answers ;)

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

#209

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.

It always feels like going back in time whenever an American requests a cheque. I haven't filled one in for over 15 years at this stage.

I am curious, what did you use to make significant one-time payments? E.g. house, or car.

Where I'm from (Italy) we still use cheques, and where I live (Hungary) they never used them. This was odd for me.

This resulted in people here buying expensive items by going around with a literal bag of money, or people having to walk into a bank together.

Possibly now it's solved with instant payments and everyone having a mobile banking app, I don't know.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also working with Brazilian instant payments schema, aka PIX. We've simply created a mapping layer to convert all ISO messaging to json. Internally all our logic runs on json. It works because at the end of the day, payments only need a few fields to work: Source, Destination, Amount.

>json I hope you aren't using floats for cents!

Honest question. Would it differ if one used floats in json rather than floats in XML?
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