Re:Texas poised to get own stock exchange – with less red ta...
by tombert on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @10:34AM
(#40585291)
I worked for a bank for about three months last year, specifically on the ACH processing system.
I had previously kind of bought into the cryptocurrency crap about how "bloated" and "draconian" the banking system in the US was, and that's an easy narrative to fall into...the ACH standard is 800+ pages long! Surely us genius software engineers can do better than all these dumb financial regulators.
But as I read through the standard (I'll admit I mostly skimmed, 800 pages of dry financial text isn't exactly exhilarating stuff), I learned that, actually, most of these rules are actually pretty reasonable. It turns out that sending money between people is actually a pretty complicated thing, with tons of edge cases that you have to consider (e.g. How do you deal with fraudulent transactions? How do you deal with situations where you send money to a dozen accounts but one of the account numbers is wrong? Which transactions need to be reversible? etc.).
Definitely having a "why" attached to every single regulation could be helpful. I'm not going to claim that every regulation associated with finance is (still) necessary, but it's rarely as cut and dry as it initially seems.
I had previously kind of bought into the cryptocurrency crap about how "bloated" and "draconian" the banking system in the US was, and that's an easy narrative to fall into...the ACH standard is 800+ pages long! Surely us genius software engineers can do better than all these dumb financial regulators.
But as I read through the standard (I'll admit I mostly skimmed, 800 pages of dry financial text isn't exactly exhilarating stuff), I learned that, actually, most of these rules are actually pretty reasonable. It turns out that sending money between people is actually a pretty complicated thing, with tons of edge cases that you have to consider (e.g. How do you deal with fraudulent transactions? How do you deal with situations where you send money to a dozen accounts but one of the account numbers is wrong? Which transactions need to be reversible? etc.).
Definitely having a "why" attached to every single regulation could be helpful. I'm not going to claim that every regulation associated with finance is (still) necessary, but it's rarely as cut and dry as it initially seems.