Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

digitaltransactions.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 81 posts

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#11

Post by toomuchtodo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also expect with healthcare reform for healthcare related payments to decline. Not to mention an aging population will see a decline in payment activity. With that said, it'd be swank to move as much paper checking activity to ACH as possible for efficiency reasons, as well as credit card activity to ACH to de-financialize payments (finance absorbs too much of GDP IMHO).

> I would also expect with healthcare reform for healthcare related payments to decline. In general, more people covered by public and/or private insurance means more insurer to provider payments.

More total dollar amount, lower quantity of payments, no? As you're cutting out all of the admin overhead, billing here and there, everywhere.

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#12

Post by imglorp »

le-mark wrote: post #5

If anyone's interested in beta testing an app for easily viewing/editing fixed length files (ACH format files) shoot me an email.

I seem to remember reading somewhere the transport channel used to be nightly FTP of these files in a cron job. Is that still true, and if so, how do they manage to secure something like that?

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#13

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #8
dragonwriter wrote: post #6

The article characterized healthcare as an anticipated future front, but US insurers have been required to offer ACH payments since 2014. https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Administrative-...

I would also expect with healthcare reform for healthcare related payments to decline. Not to mention an aging population will see a decline in payment activity. With that said, it'd be swank to move as much paper checking activity to ACH as possible for efficiency reasons, as well as credit card activity to ACH to de-financialize payments (finance absorbs too much of GDP IMHO).

[deleted]

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#17

Post by dragonwriter »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11
dragonwriter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would also expect with healthcare reform for healthcare related payments to decline. In general, more people covered by public and/or private insurance means more insurer to provider payments.

More total dollar amount, lower quantity of payments, no? As you're cutting out all of the admin overhead, billing here and there, everywhere.

> More total dollar amount, lower quantity of payments, no?

Well, I mean, that depends on the shape of reform. If you mean what the ACA did, no.

Medicare for All? Maybe.

> As you're cutting out all of the admin overhead, billing here and there, everywhere.

A significant share, as I understand it, of that cross-billing is to get an official denial from a higher-priority payer to show to another payer; my intuition would be that more coverage and security of payments would, even in a move to single payer, increase final number of payments unless actual payments are grouped and consolidated rather than paid individually as approved.

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#18

Post by barbecue_sauce »

imglorp wrote: post #12
le-mark wrote: post #5

If anyone's interested in beta testing an app for easily viewing/editing fixed length files (ACH format files) shoot me an email.

I seem to remember reading somewhere the transport channel used to be nightly FTP of these files in a cron job. Is that still true, and if so, how do they manage to secure something like that?

SFTP?

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#19

Post by Qworg »

amaccuish wrote: post #9

Does ACH cost? I know in the UK we have faster payments, it usually shows up a few seconds later in the target account, and it's free. I've mostly stopped using paypal as a result.

ACH is incredibly cheap at scale, but not free.

Frankly, the US financial infrastructure is abysmal - we've papered things over for a long time. I'm happy to be currently working on fixing it.

Re: Behind the ACH’s Sizzling Growth

#20

Post by Qworg »

djhworld wrote: post #3

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago (Planet Money) and was genuinlely shocked at how poor the US payments network is in relation to here in the UK. Most bank transactions here complete within 2 hours (faster payments service) and are completely free.

The US Federal Reserve is currently trying to work towards faster payments - and seems to want to let private industry solve the problem.

It really is terrible though and has been for a long time.

Post reply on HN