What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person? • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#11

Post by teilo » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

Ah, NACHA, oh how I hate thee.

If only NACHA files were JSON as shown in the example in the article.

I wrote a NACHA processor in MS Access many years ago for a client in the insurance industry. That thing is still being used. God, I wish it would die. Although, I'm not sure which is worse: Parsing and generating the NACHA record format, or trying to parse and generate JSON in VBA.

Why MS Access? Their entire claims processing system (which I did not write) ran on it. I only just got that damn thing migrated to an MSSQL backend. The pain.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#12

Post by itcrowd » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be much better at this .. ?

(+) Partial answer found here, but not satisfying https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/27474/why-are-wire...

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#13

Post by teraflop » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

s9w wrote: post #2

Neither the title of this post nor the article explains what ACH is. And it somehow got 15 points in 6 minutes or so. Am I missing something? edit: yes, downvote me to -3. I love you all

Also currently on the front page:

* An article about a null-pointer bug in GCC that doesn't explain what pointers are

* An article about Stripe that doesn't explain what Stripe is or does

* An article about the programming language Julia that doesn't explain what Julia is.

I think it's your expectations that are out of whack. Not every article needs to explain everything as if the reader is completely unfamiliar with the topic being discussed.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#14

Post by C14L » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:19 PM UTC

s9w wrote: post #2

Neither the title of this post nor the article explains what ACH is. And it somehow got 15 points in 6 minutes or so. Am I missing something? edit: yes, downvote me to -3. I love you all

Probably the US version of European SEPA.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#15

Post by grecy » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:20 PM UTC

itcrowd wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be…

Moving from Australia to Canada/US felt like going back in time 20 years when it came to banking.

Even ten years ago in Australia I could do more with my online banking than I can today in North America.

Checks are for what now?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#16

Post by ergothus » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

Perhaps those well-versed in such arts can inform me, who knows little about ACH and the rest:

Why is it so slow? I get that this is a system that can work built on top of any number of manual processes, but check-cashing scams are rampant and function in world where a major bank gets a check (apparently) from a different major bank and the customer is told it is all good....and possibly weeks later the check is noted as invalid and the deposit reversed.

...why can't the big players (at least) confirm things quickly? Why can't there be an easy status to say if a check has truly "cleared" or not?

The amount of fraud committed using this must be astronomical, based on how many reports I see without really looking.

What is the piece I'm missing?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#17

Post by leetcrew » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

itcrowd wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be…

isn't it usually free to transfer money between accounts if you're willing to wait? I've never paid a fee to transfer money, but it usually takes 2-3 days to clear.

now wires (near instant transfers) have usually been about $25 sometimes plus a certain percent of the transaction amount. I always assumed that was the cost of having a real human audit the request and perform it in realtime.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#18

Post by theossuary » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

ergothus wrote: post #16

Perhaps those well-versed in such arts can inform me, who knows little about ACH and the rest: Why is it so slow? I get that this is a system that can work built on top of any number of manual processes, but check-cashing scams are rampant and function in world where a major bank gets a check (apparently) from a different major bank and the customer is told it is all good....and possibly weeks later the check is note…

There's an interesting series of blog posts on the topic: https://engineering.gusto.com/how-ach-works-a-developer-pers...

And the accompanying hackernews thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7636066

But basically it seems like ACH is slow because the federal reserve runs once a day batches.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#19

Post by lettergram » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

grecy wrote: post #15

itcrowd wrote: post #12

This reminds me of a question I've had for the longest time (+): why is it that in the US wiring money between accounts is so expensive or difficult? Whole ecosystems of companies have sprung up (PayPal and Stripe come to mind, and apps such as TransferWise) to reduce the friction when the banks could easily set up a way cheaper system that would actually be better (privacy etc.) for the consumer. The EU seems to be…

Moving from Australia to Canada/US felt like going back in time 20 years when it came to banking. Even ten years ago in Australia I could do more with my online banking than I can today in North America. Checks are for what now?

I use checks all the time actually. Every other form of payment online is “pull”, I only want to “push” my funds to external people.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#20

Post by teilo » Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

ergothus wrote: post #16

Perhaps those well-versed in such arts can inform me, who knows little about ACH and the rest: Why is it so slow? I get that this is a system that can work built on top of any number of manual processes, but check-cashing scams are rampant and function in world where a major bank gets a check (apparently) from a different major bank and the customer is told it is all good....and possibly weeks later the check is note…

The entire system is built around asynchronous batch processing, as one would expect given when it was designed.

It assumes intermittent serial connections between systems to transfer the payload. The systems then process the payload offline, generate a response, and send back the result during the next transfer window.

Nowadays this is done via the Internet,* but the same basic architecture, and in many cases, the same mainframe backends, are still being used to do the processing.

* I'm not sure how the banks and the Fed are connected, actually. But ACH from businesses almost always go over the Internet. They used to go over dialup.