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What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

moderntreasury.com

211–220 of 226 posts

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't transfer money between banks in US Dollars within the US for free? We really are blessed with SEPA¹. Still, a few cents sounds at least reasonable. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

Most times, the financial institution will eat the ACH fee, so to the customer it looks like it's free. SEPA also doesn't mean that the transactions are free, either. According to a third party transfer service ( https://transferwise.com/help/15/paying-for-your-transfer/29... ) there might still be some fees from banks.

If you do commercial SEPA Transfers, yes there are fees. If you only do push transactions (ie, customers sends SEPA transaction to you), it's largely account management fees.

The pull transaction (SEPA Debit) isn't free, you can buy transaction packets (usually around 5-15€ per 1000 transactions) as well as paying a fee on monthly cash inflow (usually around 0.1-0.3%). Honestly, it's peanuts.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#213
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.

For the better since ACH is woefully insecure.

Tbh there isn't much security in SEPA either. The only reason SEPA Debit Fraud is rare is because A) it requires you having a bank account with a verified address and business registration and B) the bank is liable if the vendor goes fraudstering. The bank gets the money from the fraudster or they loose it.

You can also easily block or reverse transfers either in general or for specific merchants including down to blocking only weekly payments under 50€ from vendor X if you want to be really specific.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't transfer money between banks in US Dollars within the US for free? We really are blessed with SEPA¹. Still, a few cents sounds at least reasonable. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

Most times, the financial institution will eat the ACH fee, so to the customer it looks like it's free. SEPA also doesn't mean that the transactions are free, either. According to a third party transfer service ( https://transferwise.com/help/15/paying-for-your-transfer/29... ) there might still be some fees from banks.

Naturally the UK banks found a way to charge consumers for SEPA payments.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#215
post #79
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's same day ACH, but I have no idea how widespread it is yet: https://www.nacha.org/same-day-ach-resource-center Anecdotally, I recently moved my banking to a discount broker and my paycheck is now credited to my account the night before. I don't know if that has anything to do with same-day ACH. Also anecdotally, Ally takes 5 business days (!) to open a CD via ACH even for an already verified bank. Definitely f…

> my paycheck is now credited to my account the night before

Some "nice" banks always do this, like USAA.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, as an example here's a major British energy company: > Our bank details are: > Bank account number - 99183129 > Sort code - 57-40-99 https://sse.co.uk/help/bills-and-paying/how-to-pay-your-ener... This company is easily large enough that their bank details are already listed in online banking systems. You can choose "Pay a bill", then select "Southern Energy" rather than type in those account details.

Actually, several of my bills work that way, but the bank hides the details.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#217
post #189

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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…

My sense is that's the vast minority. I think most of the % fee-based "instant withdrawals" are done without understanding the effective APR. "It's only 1%!"

Venmo used to have a flat fee of $0.25 then they changed it to 1%. I'm guessing for most people, it would never be a problem since most people are usually only sending small amounts to eachother on Venmo (paying someone back for lunch or splitting utilities) but now Paypal gets a larger cut of people doing instant transfer of things like rent payments.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#218
post #11

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…

The new international standard for banking is ISO 20022 [1]. Yes, it's XML, but it also doesn't have fixed width lengths, and is relatively extensible.

20022 does a lot more than just payments, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_20022

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work for financial institution in the US. I think that the nature of wire transfers makes them somewhat risky. The institutions facilitating the transfers assume some of that risk for their consumers. If a large some of money is moved from your account to someone else's, and you dispute the transfer, the institution sending the wire may have to refund you the money. The cost of a single transfer offsets…

I don't see how cheques (or credit cards) are any different in this regard. Cheques can be forged, just as easy, if not easier than a wire transfer.

Checks you tend to purchase from the FI and credit card purchases have fees, but they are covered by the merchant.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every other form of payment online is “pull”, […] Wat? When I transfer money to another account via my bank's ebanking app that is very much "push". The transfer is executed either immediately or at the end of the business day. Nobody is pulling anything.

I assume you live in the EU (or somewhere else outside the US), where it is the most natural thing to just send money from your account to another one. This simply isn't a thing in the US, as I discovered when moving to there for a time. They use third-party apps, cheques, and wire transfers (which are expensive and seem to work via ACH, a pull type system). It's simply not possible to go into your ebanking app and t…

Lived in the USA all my life, have always wanted to have direct transfer as you describe.
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