Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
251–260 of 431 posts
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is SEPA instant in Europe which is quite recent. But most banks charge to send money through it or have not implemented the sending part yet.
SEPA instant started November 2017. I have 3 banks in 2 SEPA countries, none of them is participating. Not that I would need it, because SEPA transfers which are "free", mandatorily offered by every bank and take only 1 banking day. But there could be use cases for instantaneously. https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
Normal SEPA does not work in weekends just like ACH even though the core process is moving XML files to an shared FTP server.
SEPA instant could be starting point for mobile based payments in Eurozone which is currently not present in anyway.
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
There is another reason. This is very specific to the way USA does things. It has to do with the role of the government vs. market. Other countries also had an antiquated payments infrastructure e.g. Cheques in Britian, Scandinavian countries etc. The government there simply mandated the dozen or so banks to come up with an instant/real-time payment system and it was rolled out in a few years US has more than 10,000…
Have there been studies about this? I'm pretty sure Adam Smith predates mass advertising, branding, modern marketing.
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#254Earlier 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’m from Glasgow. Completely random fact ahead: The underground in Glasgow was comprised of orange trains. They “ran like clockwork” and had the nickname “the clockwork orange”, which is where the Stanley Kubrick movie title came from. Allegedly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)#Tit...
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
When we bought our cars, we just upped the daily transfer limit. I’m not sure how my husband transferred the down payment for our house, though — it was all in his savings account, and was above that 50k EUR maximum daily transfer limit. The proceeds of the mortgage we took for the rest was transferred by the bank to the seller once the bank was satisfied with the purchase contract and that the Grundbuch (city property registry) was clear.
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#256I moved to India at the start of the year and there's the Universal Payment Interface (UPI) here that essentially allows a Venmo like interface to transfer $ instantaneously from any bank account to another - by simply using the recipient's phone number or a QR code. There are multiple apps that interface with UPI, and the barrier to entry isn't high - allowing for good competition on the UX. Literally every person I…
It's more like stepping out of the past. It's not that India is particularly ahead, it's that the US is particularly behind.
The EU for example has essentially instant SEPA transfers now and has done for a while.
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
No it would not, but you could use decimals in xml. Edit: looks like there is no float in xml.
Nor are there floats in JSON! Json numbers are stored in decimal with varying lengths.
While alternative parsers exists (javascript has LosslessJSON for example), they're a pain to use.
Using strings for floats only has a tiny overhead, but it allows users to use standard JSON parsers and it signals a good practice.
If you use JSON numbers to serialize money, you create a situation where the path with the least friction is the incorrect one.
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#258What 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 wonde…
This sounds like Bitcoin.
>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
Sure, with bitcoin you can't get charged maliciously (if you don't get your keys stolen) or get hit by a chargeback but... i can't think of any financial system that's less error tolerant and that requires more attention to errors. What he describes has nothing to do with bitcoin, at all.
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#259I moved to India at the start of the year and there's the Universal Payment Interface (UPI) here that essentially allows a Venmo like interface to transfer $ instantaneously from any bank account to another - by simply using the recipient's phone number or a QR code. There are multiple apps that interface with UPI, and the barrier to entry isn't high - allowing for good competition on the UX. Literally every person I…
Re: Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
Here in The Netherlands, instant electronic payments with your debit card (pinnen) has been widely available since 1990. People sometimes used cheques before that, but even then it was rare. Most large payments happened by "Acceptgiro". It's a form that the sender would mail to the bank to authorize a payment to another bank account. Not sure if there's a proper English name for it.
The actual money transfers (the €5 you paid at some shop from your account to the pin terminal vendor, and the hourly or daily total for that shop from the vendor to the shop's internal account) take place hours after the fact.
So for all parties involved it seems instant, but technology wise it's still more or less batched, but seems instant based on trust.
Of course in The Netherlands, we have SEPA Instant Payments now (based on but not entirely the same as the European IP scheme). These are actually instant; when you pay, account balances of you and the creditor (at the other bank) are updated within 5 seconds.