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Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments

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

#321

Post by greggyb »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #97
hedora wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've worked with several large healthcare organizations in a consulting capacity. You would be laughed out of a room for suggesting SSN or name and birthday as the primary identifier for an individual. All used an internal patient ID.

Some had processes that would use an SSN or name and birthday as inputs to an identification procedure. These procedures would invariably include additional steps.

It's perfectly reasonable to ask someone their name and birthday. You can easily use these as search keys to be presented with a list of options. Then, you can select the appropriate record from that list. Sometimes you might need additional information to determine the correct record. If so, you ask the patient.

Each organization also had many reconciliation processes to resolve misidentified patients.

All this to say, they were explicitly not using SSN to identify patients. Sometimes they are put in situations where this is the primary identifying datum for a record, and this is an (unfortunately common) exceptional situation to be resolved.

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

#322

Post by lelc »

culopatin wrote: post #147
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 alternative do you suggest? Keeping in mind all the parties that will be involved, besides your project.

Create a fit to purpose, simpler, protocol using a good interface specification language (OpenAPI or protocol buffers). Maybe borrow concepts and patterns from the ISO standard, but not adopt it. It will not deliver its promise of interoperability. It might actually make it harder to interoperate with other payment schemes.

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

#323

Post by SamuelAdams »

harikb wrote: post #130

One thing I don't see mention regarding the existing US ACH (or whatever interbank) system is that there is absolutely no verification or security in this system. Just like verification of paper check signature and a whole lot of other financial items - most banks allow anything until questioned. The easiest and cost effective way is to let it happen and reimburse for failures. 1. I have linked a non-joint account in…

Regarding 3, securing against well-informed attackers (ie, family or spouses) is really difficult. They have access to their partner's phone, know their last four addresses, have their email on an iPad, so on and so forth. Bruce discusses the challenges with it in a recent paper [1]. Really interesting and worth a read, IMO.

[1]: https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/Privacy_Threats...

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

#324

Post by oneplane »

Welcome to 2005, you're gonna like it! /s

To be fair, this has been the norm here for decades and it baffles most of us that some shady companies like venmo are used so much in the USA. The same with 'numbered accounts' or no-factor authentication where people can steal your money by knowing a single number.

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

#325

Post by skeletal88 »

perlgeek wrote: post #287
throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I felt like I stepped into the future. 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.

> The EU for example has essentially instant SEPA transfers now and has done for a while. It seems that for me (in Germany) transfers still only arrive the next business day. Something must be going on there...

Where I live (in Estonia) all bank transfers are instant payments, and they are free. I don't have to pay a transaction fee for them.

Must be a problem with your bank, or the other banks. They must implement the instant payments in their systems.

Here in Estonia the SEPA payments were a step back, because we already had a quite fast transaction system between banks, transactions happened about every hour or so. Then came SEPA and transactions became slower, and now we have instant transactions, even better.

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

#326

Post by woodruffw »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #282
djsumdog wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first job out of university was working for a debt collection firm that made its own ACH engine in Perl. I remember all the 99999s and headers and stuff. I didn't work very much on the engine though (thankfully). I was pretty shocked at just how far behind the American banking system was when I lived overseas for a bit. I wrote about it here: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-american-banking-system-i...

Your blog article is startlingly incorrect pretty early on. Individuals can and do use ACH between each other all the time. It is literally how paper checks work in the US. And I’ve been able to use a routing number and account number to send money to someone else online via ACH for decades...

Thanks for the feedback! I’m aware that checks (and “instant” payments like PayPal, Venmo, Zelle) are settled via ACH; as other commenters have pointed out for me, the claim was that individuals can’t make “raw” ACH transactions.

As for sending money via routing and account number: I’ve received conflicting information from different banks on how acceptable this is. The university I went to allowed it as a way to pay tuition (you could give them your account number and they would debit you), but every bank that I’ve privately banked with has told me that I need to own or be responsible for both accounts in order to do a “direct” (i.e. non-cheque) transfer. But I don’t know whether that’s just a policy thing among financial institutions.

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

#327

Post by skeletal88 »

boruto wrote: post #238
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.

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.

In Estonia all the large banks have implemented it, and they don't charge for sending the payments either. All payments are by default instant.

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

#328

Post by skeletal88 »

riffraff wrote: post #209
rorykoehler wrote: post #189

Earlier 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 I bought my apartment I was at the notary, with the previous owners, a bank representantive and me. The bank person gave me a paper payment for which she had filled already and I had to sign it.

Here in Estonia, or northern europe.. or even eastern europe, nobody uses cheques, nobody has ever seen one I guess.

I haven't bought a car yet, but I guess I would just get the payment details for the car and go to a bank office, give them the seller's bank account information and tell them to transfer the money.

Big purchases won't be helped by instant transactions or mobile banking because there are daily limits on your account, for your protection, so that when someone somehow manages to get into your account (though it should be impossible.. they would need to get my mobile phone, and get my 2 pin numbers that I have memorised. Maybe when someone is forced to go to their internet bank by threat of violence? and transfer money then), then they couldn't take all the money in the account in one day.

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

#329

Post by selykg »

dboreham wrote: post #317
withinboredom wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even further behind. I still live overseas and use a US bank account for paying taxes, etc. I'm still shocked that it costs me, my family, or someone money to send money instantly. Here when we go out to dinner with friends, someone pays the bill and we settle it with bank transfers within moments.

It's worse than that if the amount is non-trivial. Wells Fargo won't allow you to send an amount over $10k instantly without physically entering a branch.

I think the first problem is you are talking about Wells Fargo. One of the worst banking options imaginable in the US.

While limits might not be much different from other banks, at the very least it's not Wells Fucking Fargo.

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

#330

Post by skeletal88 »

reaperducer wrote: post #120
geofft wrote: 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';"

But the government already has all the data about you. Just in lots of places and kind of disorganised I guess.

I see that having an ID number for everyone would better help to organise the data and let the government offer better services. Like.. when one deparment has asked for my address then it stores it somewhere, and when some other department needs it, then it gets it from the database, and doesn't have to ask for it again, and again and again on every interaction.

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