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What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

moderntreasury.com

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Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#171

Post by Aeolun »

saarons wrote: post #29
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…

CTO of Modern Treasury here. Banks are actually starting to setup a new payment system between themselves called Real-Time Payments (RTP) which has a lot of the same benefits as wire transfers. RTP is 24/7, instant, and (from our experience) much cheaper than wire transfers. It's starting to roll-out across more banks and currently ~50% of bank accounts can receive RTP transfers [1]. I just cashed out on Venmo the ot…

$35! No wonder everyone pays with credit cards and cheques...

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#172

Post by brongondwana »

girvo wrote: post #162
brongondwana wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving from Norway back to Australia felt like going back in time 20 years when it came to banking! In Norway I'd get a new bill and enter the code into my banking and it would offer me an option to "automatically approve up to X per month for this vendor". Automatically approved bills didn't get auto paid - but they appeared in the "upcoming bills" when issued, with a pay date of the due date on the bill. I could go…

BPay gets you close with that. Had that for years and years at this point. Now we have Osko and PayID which is immediate free payments without needing to remember bank account details. It’s neat!

Yeah, PayID is pretty cool.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#173

Post by patio11 »

js2 wrote: post #143
pbreit wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses use ACH extensively to pay each other same-day (and debit consumer bank accounts). But it has never caught on for consumer "push" payments.

Is pull a totally different process? I’ve noticed for pull you have to authenticate the account (usually) with the “verify the two small deposits” dance while push will sometimes let you skip that. In fact, I just called Citi earlier today because I’d closed a CC with them and had a credit. The CS rep asked for my routing and acct number and without even verifying it with me immediately said “you’ll see the credit in…

If you don’t get the money you’ll call up Citibank again to complain and they’ll take the hit to their operational losses budget [0], which happens infrequently as a percentage of transactions but quite frequently over the totality of the system. That’s what the budget is for.

[0] Contingent on the transaction going through and not being reversible, which can happen for many reasons (staleness by the time you report it, disinclination of someone who enjoys Monopoly to repay Bank Error In Your Favor, CS staff not having a button that reverses the transaction, Citi’s ops team [1] considering it beneath their notice, etc.)

[1] I oddly enough know the name of their SVP in charge of this team because Citi escheated a check due to me to the state of Illinois back in 200X. Illinois told me they had insufficient information to determine that I’m the same Patrick McKenzie so they want said SVP to file a report on my behalf. I assess 80%+ likelihood that they’ll comply. This is boring inside baseball mostly meant to underline the fact that BigBank actually does have people with names and addresses who deal individually with transactions according to some fairly involved business processes.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#174

Post by r00fus »

dexterdog wrote: post #97
saarons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically Americans have been wary of handing out their bank account information because that's all the information needed for a bad actor to issue an ACH debit and pull money from your account. The NACHA guidelines have very strict rules around this and the payment protections are rather strong but it's still a pain to deal with as a consumer. RTP itself is non-reversible so when someone sends you an RTP payment…

You hand out your bank account information every time you give somebody a check

Many banks have different values for the check MICR account numbers vs ACH routing purely to avoid easily spoofed ACH requests.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#175

Post by patio11 »

pbreit wrote: post #109
GhettoMaestro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Just transferred $2K from my PayPal account (ebay sales) to my checking account. Slight clarification: PayPal caps the transfer fees at $10.

Folks do realize that paying 1% to speed up a transfer by 1-2 days is equivalent to a 180%-365% interest loan?

In many cases they’ll be paying 1% of e.g. $40 either to avoid having to think about this any more or because they have extremely toothy consequences to not having the cash today. e.g. The implicit interest rate on an NSF fee if they don’t fund the $10 overdraft currently happening on their checking account due to the rent check being deposited, which they have 3 hours to cover before the cutoff, is on the order of 3.8e200%. ($35 interest to borrow $10 for a day.)

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#176

Post by Animats »

baddox wrote: post #116
munk-a wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article on the null-pointer bug goes into technical details about what the exposed error case is - the fact that it's a bug is made super clear - the fact that it's a logic bug is pretty readily apparent. The Stripe article starts with "I worked at Stripe for 3+ years" so Stripe is clearly a company, the article itself is focused on the operations & team cohesion side of stripe not on their line of business. The…

> ACH is not a common jargon term It’s not jargon at all, is it? It’s just literally the proper name for the specific payment network. I thought jargon is industry-specific slang terms for concepts that could otherwise be described with less industry-specific terms. There is no simpler or clearer way I’m aware of to refer specifically to ACH. As for it being common, if you work as a developer on any web products that…

> ACH is not a common jargon term

It is for anyone involved with money. However, it is a noun, not a verb.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#177

Post by KC8ZKF »

pessimizer wrote: post #164
KC8ZKF wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully expanding an acronym the first time it is used is part of standard written English (SWE).

Expanding that acronym wouldn't help. I hate to get into this silly discussion, but we're all having it on the internet. It's easier to find out what ACH is by using the internet than to post a question on the internet asking what ACH is.

Regardless, it is still a standard courtesy.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#178

Post by mgkimsal »

dexterdog wrote: post #97
saarons wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically Americans have been wary of handing out their bank account information because that's all the information needed for a bad actor to issue an ACH debit and pull money from your account. The NACHA guidelines have very strict rules around this and the payment protections are rather strong but it's still a pain to deal with as a consumer. RTP itself is non-reversible so when someone sends you an RTP payment…

You hand out your bank account information every time you give somebody a check

my bank prints out paper checks but they seem to xfer the money through another company. money leaves my bank account, but the checks, when delivered, have a completely different routing and account number. doesn't matter to me, but I had a paper check payment I needed to return and the local branch couldn't help me at all - the floor guy there couldn't even understand my situation. there was an 800 number on the check to call and I explained and they cancelled that check.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#179

Post by mattmcknight »

jpindar wrote: post #78
mattmcknight wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point here is that the various bills I have to pay don't give me their bank account number, but they ask for me to give them our account information so they can automatically subtract whatever amount. If they would give me their account numbers, I would gladly send them funds. Instead, I use my bank's online bill pay to generate a check for them.

>I use my bank's online bill pay to generate a check which has your account information on it (I do the same thing, though.)

I am not so much worried about the fraud aspect, as I am explicitly giving them permission to take amounts of their determination from my account without my explicit agreement to the amount of each transaction and on their schedule.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#180

Post by mattmcknight »

itcrowd wrote: post #71
mattmcknight wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you pay your electric bill with those?

Yes, I pay all my bills by bank transfer (house, electric, internet, settlements with friends etc). It's the most common payment method here (I'm in Europe). PayPal et al are barely used here because the bank transfer system is free and frictionless.

So the electric company gives you their account number to use?
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