Planet Money actually did a podcast about this. Banks are basically incentivized not to have it and keep ACH that way it is. A free and fast transfer service would destroy their wire revenue stream.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episo...

Yup. BofA charges $35 or $45 for wire transfers. That's a hell of a lot of money when you have 200'000'000 captive customers.

For domestic transfers, under what circumstances do people use wire instead of ACH transfers? I've only used wire transfers for international purposes.

Walmart person to person. It's $10 for amounts over $50. American Express Bluebird cards have a person to person, and there is PayPal. PayPal debit MasterCard makes the last one an attractive option.

It's funny. Every time I mention Walmart and how actual people who don't have all the advantages in life handle finacial transactions, I'm down voted. I think there are some blind spots in some of HN's users.

Hmm, I found the comment useful and just up voted it.

Only time I've had to wire money was for the downpayment on a house. Apparently there's a limit to how much you can send over ACH (at least with some banks).

The difference is reversibility.

ACH never settles, it just hasn't returned yet. There's a 60 day window for ordinary not authed returns, and even past that in cases of fraud. ACH is also push or pull, you can push money or the person you're paying can pull. (Or paychecks. A lot of paychecks are run over ACH). There are limits on ACH, depending on what you're doing its anywhere from 2.5k to 25k to $10^8.

Wires are nearly irreversible. Once you send the money, it's Gone. So the banks have a lot more documentation that they do for retail customers. Wires are push only.

This still astounds me.

I'm Australian but also hold a US account. The difference in ease between the two is insane. I cannot believe how difficult it is to simply wire money from a US bank account. In Australia, you can make a free transfer entirely from web/app and it will be received, often the next day.

It's no wonder why Paypal/Venmo are so huge in the US...

Not only that, in Australia to pay rent you can just set up BPay or an automated transfers. You can also wire your deposit to most landlords.

In the US they want cheques and money orders. It's insane.

FYI the Australian Payments Clearing Association is building a new payments platform to enable instant transfers and is expected to be operational by the second half of 2017:

http://www.apca.com.au/about-payments/future-of-payments/new...

In NZ it is immediate if same bank, 10pm that night if different. That few hours though can be nice if you change your mind.

On my New Zealand business account we can see transactions turn up every hour - that's how often they are cleared between the major banks. And my personal credit card balance on my mobile app changes seconds after I make a purchase.

"In Australia, you can make a free transfer entirely from web/app and it will be received, often the next day."

In the UK or China, it's minutes/hours, as long as you do the transfer before a certain time.

Sorry, should edit that - it's immediate for us in Australia if you have transferred to a certain person before OR if you use the same bank.

It's the next day for external banks / people that you haven't transferred to before.

"It's the next day for external banks / people that you haven't transferred to before."

OK - so you're still a touch behind the UK and China ;)

Agreed. Still miles ahead of the US! ;)

And I believe the big four banks are working on increasing that to four clearances per day.

In the UK, we have an industry-wide "Faster Payments"[1] system that allows for inter-bank transfers in less than an hour. The majority of banks also support Paym[2], which links a bank account to your mobile phone number, so people can send money to your mobile and it lands in your bank account.

Recently, the government decided that an Open Banking API Standard would be a good idea, so work has begun on figuring out how to deliver that.[3]

1: http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk

2: http://www.paym.co.uk

3: http://theodi.org/news/open-banking-working-group-uk-experts...

I'm a freelancer and I've had happily clients pay me through PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla and other services.

But if I were a landlord, I'd sadly ask for a check too. A lot of U.S. jurisdictions require a landlord not to accept rent in certain circumstances from a tenant he's trying to evict.

It's well established how to do this with a check: don't cash it, and possibly send it back to the sender certified mail. I wouldn't want to risk paying my lawyer to establish a precedent for what that looks like through a new payment system.

Is that really true? I hear claims of that sort but never actualities (I worked for a rent payment company).

If only there was some way to not accept an electronic payment.

if this is the only time that having inbound money is a problem (is it?) then wouldn't amending the law be easier?

Things should get better, to some extent, with Same Day ACH.

Starting September 2016, their should be relatively cheap next day ACH transactions available to the majority of US bank accounts.

It's far from perfect: still not instant, will probably cost money (interbank fee of about $0.09), and won't immediately support debits. However, it's a big step forward for US banks.

In Denmark we have MobilePay and Swipp. The former works with your phone number and credit card, and the latter works with your phone number and bank account. When you want to send money, you send it to the receivers phone number and they can see it seconds later in the app, and on the account shortly after. It's really simple, though I probably would use it to pay for rent.

For payment between parties we have multiple systems. For one time payments we have FIK (a Danish way to request and pay between banks), for recurring payments we have "Betalings Service" which is basically an automated version of FIK, and lately automatic CC billing. I don't even think I can write checks anymore. I can request one from the bank for a fee, but I've done that exactly once in the last 15 years, when I bought my car.

In Sweden we have Swish (also linked to your phone number and bank account) and a bunch of other options.

It's interesting how fast you can abandon cash when you have decent alternatives. Most NZ banks support paying people to their cell phone number too, with a URL to follow to get the money. It's not that clunky either which is surprising to me (given how long decent mobile apps have taken).

It's true, and I had in the past. Then I got wary about how everything in life is recorded in a database. So, have switched back to cash for non-recurring purchases.

In China, it is also very convenient to send money by cellphone by scan some code. It's that easy.

I presume you're talking about WeChat or AliPay payment. The US has equivalents, but they're not as advanced.

The closest US equivalent to WeChat payment is Venmo. But I can use WeChat to pay in McDonald's, not just to send money to friends.

The closest US equivalent to Alipay is Paypal. But with Alipay I can not only pay for online purchases and pay utility bills, I can also see a list of utility bills I have yet to pay.

Alipay has a interesting and convenient feature named Acoustic Payment,which support Person-To-Person payment through mobile phone's Speaker

Wow. This is pretty cool. In the English version on Android, it's called 'Sound Pay'. When activated, it makes a repeated 'shoop shoop-shoop-shoop' sound, whilst it scans for other devices in the same mode.

I haven't sent a paper check since about 1991 when I started using Bill Pay which AFAIK is part of nearly every bank in the USA now and has been for many many years. Not sure why you're sending checks manually. The bank decides if it's a transfer or a check. I don't care because to me it's been trivial for 24 years.

Compare to Japan where I had to transfer to my landlord at about $6 per transfer and doing online didn't happen until about 2003, 12 years after the USA.

Didn't say I did it manually, yes I use bill pay in this case and when I can. But, paying robots to print, mail, and deliver checks is still ridiculous when the internet exists. Not to mention the other end where the guy (I send them to a guy) deposits them.

Others have already pointed out that we already have the option Apple is developing in Denmark and Sweden.

But I also had to add that I haven't received a paper bill in several years. It used to be that bills were delivered in paper form in my mailbox every month but now I just get a notification from my bank app when I have bills and I can pay them from anywhere with my mobile phone.

We already have similar tech here in the US, it just hasn't been adopted by everybody yet.

Where? I bank with Wells Fargo and to make a wire transfer to anyone in the US, I have to physically walk into a branch and it costs $20.

Chase has "QuickPay", where you just enter the recipient's info, and the transfer is near-instantaneous. Only works with other Chase customers, however. Other banks have similar systems.

That's fairly useless if it doesn't work with other banks.

A lot of people have Chase. I've used it a bunch of times.

Amusingly enough, Wells Fargo has a similar service called SurePay. I have a friend that also banks with Wells Fargo that uses this to transfer funds to be, while it's 'fast' compared to the multi-day delay of ACH transfers it still takes one day before the funds are made available to me - from another customer at the same bank!

It amazes me that we already have four major payment networks in the US that work at the speed of the internet - Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Amex but banks continue to fight to keep ACH slow - probably because they don't make bank on interchange fees.

Banks use the float caused by check processing and transfer delays as investable funds. They have no real incentive to speed up the process, and most measures to reduce delays have come in the form of regulations.

My experience with Chase "quick" pay is that the money disappears for several days and occasionally never reaches the recipient.

Well that is alarming.

Wells Fargo's online banking can send money to anyone with an email address, mobile number or Wells Fargo account number. And there's no charge to use it, though they have a message saying they might start charging in the future.

Bank of America and Chase both have it. You can send money to someone using their email address or mobile phone number.

Those systems are kludges. I'm talking about direct bank to bank account transfers at the push of a button, even for 25 cents.

You can also transfer with an routing+account number.