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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?

#41

Post by crispinb »

jedberg wrote: post #23
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…

The short answer is "because they can". The longer answer is because banking in the US is not as sophisticated as Europe since we have many fewer banks. The few banks we have have decided it isn't worth trying to compete on convince, so they haven't bothered to update the technology to be synchronous instead of asynchronous. In Europe, there are many banks in many countries, so they had to standardize quicker. FWIW i…

> since we have many fewer banks

Australia has fewer still, with the big 5 almost entirely dominant, yet we have instant bank transfers through Osko, have had almost universal contactless in store payments for years, etc. I suspect it's more about government corruption. Governments are captured, each for its own historical reasons, by different industries. Australia by mining industries, the US by medical & finance, local governments almost everywhere by property development.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#42

Post by saarons »

itcrowd wrote: post #37
saarons wrote: 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…

Thank you for the RTP information! Had not heard of it yet. The fees look very reasonable ($0.01-$0.045 depending on type of transaction) and they provide a level playing field (flat-fee, no discounts for volume) I also heard someone say at some point that Americans are very wary of having people transfer money to their bank account. Not sure what the rationale is (maybe taxes or afraid of criminal money?) but I was…

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 it clears instantly and can never be pulled back as it can with Check and ACH payments.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#43

Post by mindslight »

loeber wrote: post #24
lettergram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not actually correct. By giving an external person a check, you give them the ABILITY to PULL funds from you. It looks like a push, but it's actually not. https://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/writing-checks-in...

More importantly you're giving them the authorization.

Everyone already has the basic ability to pull funds from arbitrary checking accounts. heh.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#44

Post by edubs25 »

leetcrew wrote: post #17
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.

If you schedule the transfer via the bank that is receiving the funds, they will usually eat the cost and not pass it onto you as the consumer. Smaller banks [which are most] will submit ACH files up to larger banks [like Wells Fargo or Bank of America] that will actually run the ACH requests through the network. The smaller bank itself is usually being charged either per file fee or some data transmission rate by the bigger bank. I think there are less than 20 banks in the US that can actually run ACH directly but it's been a while since I had to know any of this and it evolves over time.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#45

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

itcrowd wrote: post #26
lettergram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Every other form of payment online is “pull" Sorry, but if I transfer funds to a friend from my banking app, how is that "pull"? If I send you money with PayPal, that's not "pull". If we settle our debt using e.g. TransferWise, that's not "pull"..? I don't get your point. There are plenty of "push" methods.

If PayPal decided to charge you a $10 per month for “maintenance costs”, how would you stop them from doing so?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#46

Post by bsder »

loeber wrote: post #24
lettergram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not actually correct. By giving an external person a check, you give them the ABILITY to PULL funds from you. It looks like a push, but it's actually not. https://www.bankrate.com/financing/banking/writing-checks-in...

Knuth had to quit giving out real checks (which nobody actually ever cashed, anyway) for exactly this reason.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#47

Post by munk-a »

teraflop wrote: post #13
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 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 article about Julia is hosted on `julialang` and within the first paragraph there is a sentence containing: "So I thought it might be helpful to the broader Julia community—and maybe even for other programming language communities—to actually write down Julia’s release process"

None of these articles give you a full and complete comprehension of their topics - walking away from Strip I don't know if they're a listed company or what their market cap is - but I was given enough information to make it through.

ACH is not a common jargon term, and even with common jargon there usually is some explanation, if someone writes a well-written article about some MySQL quirk, it'll probably have the term "SQL" somewhere in the first paragraph and it'll certainly have the term "database" and "query" - those hints are enough to grasp the general subject matter. The word "bank" doesn't show up in the article until paragraph three and the jokey description of doing it to "a dead person" immediately derails the users ability to grasp that it's a monetary transaction - it's perfectly logical that monetary transactions need to have error handling around dead, missing and not-yet-existing people, but leading with that point harms readability.

I think this article is a great example of a poorly written piece that with some very minor edits to clearly define the scope of the article would be a lot more legible.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#48

Post by tjpaudio »

munk-a wrote: post #33
tjpaudio wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is written for people interested in the very specific topic of the technical workings ACH transfers. It seems absurd to me that you would try to write this article to an audience that hasn't even heard of ACH. I think the only thing you are missing is that you are not the target reader.

Elitism is no reason to avoid having a definition of jargon. HN has discussions on a wide variety of technical topics most of which aren't directly useful in our day job - or at least on the topic of information we'd seek out independently... But we have this list in part because intellectual curiosity is a good thing and maybe, within the way that whatever an ACH is deals with a dead person, there might be some inte…

It's not elitism. ACH is a term that should be familiar to anyone even remotely informed on the topic. It's ok to read articles on things you are unfamiliar with but it is also on you as the reader to educate yourself when you read on topics that you are unfamiliar with.

If every detail was explained in layman's terms, reading would be terribly boring and nuanced technical writing would be dead.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#49

Post by eganist »

teraflop wrote: post #13
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…

> 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.

Oof.

User s9w appears to be German. ACH is a USA construct. The closest analog would be PE-ACHes for SEPA, of which OP might be familiar. Without context and operating from a localized search zone, googling ACH may render results irrelevant to the topic at hand, requiring marginally more google-fu than might otherwise make sense just to embrace a hackernews thread.

Hackernews in general is pretty US-centric in terms of assumptions, and this comment is emblematic of this defect.

In the future, you could just answer the question, or you could opt out of replying entirely. You never know what constraints a person has encountered when trying to answer it on their own. For all you know, the user asking must work with an impairment or disability rendering simple web queries as taxing or arduous.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#50

Post by tyingq »

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…

I can send ACH and international wires from my US bank's web interface. Neither is especially hard or expensive, but it is somewhat slow...1-3 business days.
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