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What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

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Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#51

Post by reaperducer »

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?

Checks are for what now?

For me this week: Paid for a city license, paid the cat sitter, paid for a small magazine subscription, made a charitable donation, and paid the rent.

The cat sitter and the charity were check only. No other option. The magazine has a PayPal option, but I don't trust PayPal. The city license could have been done with a card online, but I'm not interested in setting up yet another account with yet another third party to mishandle my information. Paying the rent by check is free, but paying with a credit card is a $74 fee. And this is with a very large company that almost everyone knows.

People do abandon checks when possible. But for the most part it's the businesses that put up barriers. Or, in my case, a lack of trust, which has caused me to use checks more. I like the paper trail. I check my bank statement every month and at least once a year there is an error.

I am coming around somewhat on the trust thing. If I can use a virtual credit card number, I will. But not if I have to make yet another account with yet another password and yet more gathering of information that is nobody's business.

Edit: I forgot that I also had to send a check to a county recorder out if state to file some legal documents. But that was a cashier's check, not a bank draft. Still, the only form of payment accepted by that county government is cash if you live there, or a cashier's check if you're out of state.

Also, my accountant only takes cash and checks. I consider it a virtue since it indicates that she watches every penny. But I didn't put that payment in the list because it was a couple of months ago.

When your life is simple, banking is simple. As you get older and your life becomes more complicated, banking gets more complacated.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#52

Post by Kneecaps07 »

snoman wrote: post #39
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…

ACH is a file format. You generate an ACH file and then SFTP that to the Federal Bank (or another central bank... I forget which). In simple terms, the file contains a header and a bunch of batches. The header has the account info whomever generated the ACH file (a bank, usually) and the records in each batch the account info of another party. The federal bank iterates through all of the records in the file and attem…

I actually had a job where part of my responsibility was processing this file. It was literally me opening WS_FTP Pro and manually downloading and uploading that file. It blew my mind that this was how we were doing it.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#53

Post by ryanmercer »

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…

Oooh I got this one...

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

That's obviously the finger you point at people with, a null pointer is when you don't point at someone but just angrily stare at them.

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

Obviously a stripe is those lines on zebras that make them zebras

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

Clearly the one and only Julie Roberts...

Obviously I'm being stupid but that's genuinely how I feel sometimes when I open HN

- "RUST does..." erm, why are they screaming rust, I know rust is annoying if you don't sand it down and deal with it quickly but why are we yelling about oxidation

- "ExFAT..." why are they talking about their weight loss on HN

- "Wave-based non-line-of-sight computational imaging in Julia" some woman named Julia used a computer to figure out how to best appear in photographs of them waving? Must be one of the royals.

- "A+, the Programming Language of Morgan Stanley" why do I care about Morgan's grades?

- "YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users" I dunno, I watched a really good one on landfills one time, I think it also recommended me one on how fuel trucks refill gas stations after that.

- "Curl exercises" yeah, I hammer curl on Tuesdays as some of my accessory work, not a real fan of bicep curls though.

- "Is Ringo Starr a Good Drummer?" I assume this is about the Beatle but it's probably about some computer programming language in some network security application.

- "Perils of Constructors " must be English as a second language, clearly they mean Perils of Construction, certainly a mod will fix that title soon. I'm guessing death and hemorrhoids.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#54

Post by mindslight »

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…

> ...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?

Consider a forged check with valid identifying information. Think about what the other side of that transaction looks like. That other customer needs time to review incoming transactions to their account, notice the errant one, and dispute it. And so waiting this time is the only practical way the receiving bank can fully clear a transaction.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#55

Post by thro_away_n »

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…

Is this the same thing as Zelle?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#56

Post by edubs25 »

one2zero wrote: post #10
mpoteat wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACH is a bank to bank transfer.

I don't believe that its technically a bank to bank transfer because the ACH is involved. With wire transfers you're communicating directly with the bank via SWIFT or Fedwire.

I think it depends on context - I'm guessing you're thinking about flow of funds where as others are thinking about the actual process of running ACH files through the network.

As an end consumer or other entity(like a TPA or bank ISO), you can submit a request or set of requests that will end up in that banks ACH file. At the end of the day, the bank that submits that file is responsible for ensuring those requests are valid, and ensuring all the returns are processed. These requests consist of to/from account routing information and dollar amounts with a lot of other rules in the file specifications. Not every banks can submit these directly. A lot of banks submit to larger banks and so on. I vaguely recall there also being fines/fees applied to the file submitter on if you send bad data or exceed return thresholds.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#57

Post by ohyeshedid »

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…

Does RTP bypass Fedwire?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#58

Post by scarejunba »

reaperducer wrote: post #51
grecy wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Checks are for what now? For me this week: Paid for a city license, paid the cat sitter, paid for a small magazine subscription, made a charitable donation, and paid the rent. The cat sitter and the charity were check only. No other option. The magazine has a PayPal option, but I don't trust PayPal. The city license could have been done with a card online, but I'm not interested in setting up yet another account with…

I know. In America, it's such a bloody nightmare with the cheques everywhere. This should obviously be first-class supported by banks. If I could just set up direct debit that would be so much better. It would all show up on one screen, I could see what this months aggregate direct debits are, what they are to each account. You could even just use the 'Transfer Money' functionality to one-time things if you don't want to give repeat access.

And to top it all off, the American bank cheque system is so insecure.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#59

Post by djsumdog »

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…

After living in Australia and NZ for years, I wondered the same thing. I did a write up on it a while back:

https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-i...

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#60

Post by djsumdog »

thro_away_n wrote: post #55
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…

Is this the same thing as Zelle?

I don't think Zelle is real time. I'm curious if it's the same working group for RTP that was behind Zelle.
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