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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?

#71

Post by itcrowd »

mattmcknight wrote: post #63
itcrowd wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#72

Post by ThrustVectoring »

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…

A partial answer is also the US's approach to banking regulation. First off, the US prioritizes having many small community banks. The US has 4,909 banks, while Japan has 198. This necessarily makes setting up inter-operation between banks more complicated.

Second, US banks are regulated on both a Federal and State level. A system that works for a bunch of banks in California may not be viable for interoperation with banks in, say, Georgia.

In short, US banks cannot easily set up a way cheaper system with the vast number of banking partners they'd need to coordinate with and the large amount of regulatory systems to navigate.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#73

Post by bernardom »

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…

If I wanted to use RTP for my business- do any third-party processors offer it already?

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#74

Post by lonelappde »

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…

Those companies are not able to transmit money with the same scale and security as wires.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#75

Post by tempsy »

nickjj wrote: post #34
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…

Zelle[1] is a fairly recent solution to that problem. Free and nearly instant email address based transfers directly through your bank account without having to sign up for anything extra. I've done a bunch of transfers with it and it's been solid. It's about as easy as you can get and most US banks support it. [1]: https://www.zellepay.com/

Double edged sword IMO. If you use Zelle and off a digit in a phone number or email you are out of luck. No way to recover funds once sent.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#76

Post by kyrra »

As someone who has worked on integrating with BACS (UK version of ACH) they have the have the same code.

https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/receiving-messages/#audd...

"2 Payer deceased You have attempted to set up a DDI on the account of someone who is deceased. Extremely rare."

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#77

Post by reaperducer »

xfitm3 wrote: post #64
reaperducer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have not written a check in over 10 years. I do, however, use my bank's online bill pay system. When I was a renter I used this to pay. I don't have to touch any paper, or stamps.

I envy you. I'm trying to get back to a simple life, but it's hard. Some day.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#78

Post by jpindar »

mattmcknight wrote: post #62
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.

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.)

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#79

Post by js2 »

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…

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 faster to have a checking/savings account with them, wire in the funds, then open the CD from checking/savings which is instant.

Re: What Happens When You ACH a Dead Person?

#80

Post by teraflop »

eganist wrote: post #49
teraflop wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I certainly didn't intend it as a personal criticism, and if it came across that way I'm sorry!

There's nothing wrong with not knowing what ACH is and asking about it. But conversely, there's also nothing wrong with writing an article about ACH that doesn't bother to explain the background in detail, nor is there anything wrong with posting such an article to HN.

The only thing I take issue with is the suggestion that it's somehow unusual or noteworthy.

> In the future, you could just answer the question, or you could opt out of replying entirely.

I noticed that other commenters had already answered the question adequately, or else I would have included it in my response.

(For what it's worth, I just tried a Google search for "ach" in an incognito window with both region and language set to Germany, and two articles about the ACH system were on the first page of results. Again, I am not saying this to criticize for not knowing about it.)

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