(I work on Standard Treasury)

The first one is definitely something that will happen once a bank partner of ours launches the white labeled service. Electronic checks (ACH) are usually a flat, several cents, fee.

Unfortunately, debits are likely going to require some sort of verification.

I feel like you, ST, should be able to pass that liability to the company using the API. Maybe make them put $1mm in escrow or something.

I know of a few organizations that don't require verification for ACH debits.

My guess is that when he speaks of 'verification' it's more in the context of underwriting the originator of the transaction for fraud/creditworthiness vs. ensuring the account being debited is valid.

That's correct.

which companies currently let you do it?

No APIs that I know of, but there are several companies in my vertical (donations) that do this. This is one:

http://www.acceptiva.com

> b) allows you to debit a bank account w/o any verification or micro-deposits

That's an extraordinarily bad idea. If you gave a fraudster access to something like that, they could just pull money out of accounts where they had the routing and account #. You'd also be at risk if the customer fat fingered entry of those numbers and you debited the wrong account.

The US ACH rails lack a lot of necessary features to enable debits without verification of ownership of the account. Unless you want to be on the hook for the above scenarios of course.

'a' is fairly common, I believe. It's ubiquitous in Europe (typically no fee), and in the U.S., Bank of America will let you do an ACH transfer to any account in the U.S. for $3/transfer. Not sure what other banks' policies are.

Coming from Europe, I'm also used to exclusively using wire transfers for free. Not so much in the US.

What's the difference between a wire transfer and ACH transfer? (Chase charges me about $19 for every outgoing/incoming wire transfer by the way).

Wire transfers are directly from one bank to another, and will go through same-day. ACH is like writing a check, but saves you having to handle the physical paper. It still goes through all the same automated batch processing as a check, so it takes a few days to clear.

$3 is a lot. Most banks will do it for 50 cents or less. If you have huge volume (someone like Square or Stripe) you can often get it down to one or two cents.

Is a) not common?

I use ING Direct (recently bought by Capital One and recoined "Capital One 360"). You can either wire directly from one checking account to another using an ACH transfer. Or you can do a Person2Person payment which is similar to a paypal transfer. Enter your recipient's email address, ING sends them an email, they follow the directions and "pick up" the money, transfer occurs.

Both are free to the best of my knowledge.

Edit: ING is a Dutch company, so maybe that's why.

I think he may mean between 2 parties, perhaps in his application. Not specifically between himself and another party, which is possible today with a few services.

I have the a) problem and have yet to find a solution that doesn't involve (manually) sending a fixed-format file with transfer orders to the bank we work with...transfers within the EU are free, though, but this is the bank's policy (due to competition, of course). A simple RESTful API that can be used for ACH transfers across countries or even continents would be killer, given the current options...

I talked to a payments guy a while back and asked why america doesn't have the same kind of easy P2P wire transferability that europe has. He basically said it's because the banks think paypal is good enough. Paypal is the USA's P2P wire transfer system. 2 personal accounts can transfer money to each other for free. I pay my rent to my 1-property landlord by paypal with no fees too.

b) bitcoin

it's not an accident that they make it so difficult. they are protecting massive revenue streams. bitcoin solves a lot of these problems by giving people real control over how to move money around. eventually bitcoin wallets will be easy and secure enough that while you might not pay your bills with it, you'll keep a running balance on it just like amazon or itunes credit.

> it's not an accident that they make it so difficult.

The easy direct funds transfers in other countries shows that it is an accident.

In Australia, opening a bank account requires applicants to show sufficient ID (the 100-points check[1]). It was intended to cut down on money laundering and tax evasion, but as a happy side effect banks have very high assurance about who money is moving from and to.

That means that direct deposits don't require the heavy validation that a cheque does. So such transfers are free and usually settle in 24 hours. Often the same day.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_point_check